Work Work Work a Reader on Art and Labour

Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain

TIM BARRINGER Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain New Haven: Yale University Press, for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British

Anne Helmreich / The Fine art Bulletin

Dec 01, 2005

TIM BARRINGER Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Uk New Haven: Yale University Press, for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2005. 392 pp.; 33 color ills., 113 b/ w. $65.00

Orange signs emblazoned "Men at Work" are familiar sights along American highways; simply recently has "Drive slowly/My Mommy works here" cropped upward. The image of the male laboring trunk is the cardinal subject of Tim Barringer`due south Men at Work: Fine art and Labour in Victorian Britain. Past focusing on the male trunk, he brings his study into the orbit of manual, manufactory, industrial, and harvesting labor, every bit this was the traditional purview of men (with the exception of the last, equally Barringer notes in chapter two). Nineteenth-century female employment, including domestic servants, teachers, seamstresses, and governesses, is non discussed here-appropriately so, since scenes of female labor and the weather condition that produced them accept been well addressed by scholars such as Susan Casteras, Deborah Cherry, and Kristina Huneault.1 Barringer`s subtitle, with its connotations of manufacture and drudgery, is necessary, for the volume is non concerned with all aspects of piece of work. We do not run into, for example, office clerks discharging professional duties. Instead, we notice concrete labor, with mental labor relegated, metaphorically and literally, to the periphery, not to emerge center stage until later in the century, with portraits by George F. Watts and Julia Margaret Cameron.2 Physical labor, in Barringer`s account, is non limited to visual representation just also includes the endeavor, revealed or disguised, necessary to produce the work of art.

Great Britain was arguably the first nation-state to industrialize. Whereas historians take repeatedly tackled this broad phenomenon, art historians have been reluctant to practice so, with the exception of Francis D. Klingender.3 More typical have been studies of individual artists, such equally Joseph Wright of Derby, whose estate portraits, such as Arkwnght`s Mills by Night, ca. 1782-83, monumentalized and glorified the mills and whose nocturnal forge scenes (briefly revisited by Barringer) likewise celebrated the smiths,1 or J. K. W. Turner, whose Pelting, Sleam, and Speed-the Great Western Railway, 1844, and other images of industrial power have been repeatedly read as commentaries on the Industrial Revolution."` Instead of concentrating on artistic oeuvres, Klingender "synthetic a heroic scientific and industrial heritage for the nation" by assembling a vast range of visual materials, many never before published.1` Barringer acknowledges Klingender`s accomplishment but also recognizes the author`south embeddedness in the rising socialist movement that resulted in an absolutist treatment of class, "incapable of mapping the overlapping and conflicting allegiances and the complex, contested identities of the period" (p. 12). Rather than effort another broad sweep, Barringer has elected to offering instance studies that tackle the problem of art and labor from dissimilar, and sometimes unexpected, points of view and also nowadays much previously unstudied material.

In his introduction, Barringer briefly considers the Great Exhibition of 1851, which anticipated the issue of how the laboring classes and their acts of labor, concretized by the displayed exhibits, should exist visualized: Should they be erased, implied, mocked, or allegorized? Furthermore, should empire be acknowledged, and if so, how? These questions form through the subsequent narrative. The first affiliate takes up Ford Madox Brownish`s pivotal painting Work and offers a valuable interpretation regarding its articulation of masculinity. The 2d chapter examines harvest paintings by George Vicat Cole and John Linnell, which Barringer reveals to be crucial indexes of the contested meanings of rural labor in the mid-Victorian menstruum. The title of this chapter, "The Harvest Field in the Railway Age," registers effectively the peculiar frisson generated by the twinned ascendancy of rural nostalgia and automobile applied science. In the tertiary chapter, "Blacksmith and Artist," Barringer introduces us to James Sharpies, a skilled laborer and amateur artist whose visual imagery occupies an unusual position "in the interstices not but between constructions of working and middle classes but also between fine art and labour, loftier and depression, and left and right [politically]" (p. 184). The fourth affiliate investigates another disregarded artist, Godfrey Sykes, whose artistic work was both the result and articulation of the ideology of improvement at the cadre of many Victorian social visions. Sykes was employed at the S Kensington Museum, later on renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum, and we are returned to this structure in the fifth affiliate, where Barringer develops his concept of the colonial Gothic, a "hybrid form" produced by the Victorian admiration of the Gothic combined with "an increasingly politicised defence of traditional Indian craft skills," both of which shared an "antiindustrial . . . [and] anti-royal polemic of considerable power and urgency, whose essence was a re-interpretation of the meaning and value of labour" (p. 248). Readers familiar with John Ruskin`s Stones of Venice tin can recognize his contribution to this concept. In signal of fact, Ruskin, along with his colleague Thomas Carlyle, developed a compelling critique of competitive industrial guild that rested on what Barringer calls an "expressive" concept of work-that is, work equally expressive of identity and moral worth rather than as a source of economic value, as in the "instrumental" theory of work primal to John Stuart Mills`south political economy (p. 28). Appropriately enough, the claiming to Ruskin`s theory of the moral value of work posed by the Whistler versus Ruskin trial forms the conclusion. Whistler, who received the notorious settlement of a farthing in his libel suit against the art critic, negated both expressive and instrumental notions of work; instead he advocated, as Barringer quotes in closing, "Manufacture in Art is a necessity-not a virtue-and any evidence of the aforementioned, in the production, is a blemish, non a quality; a proof, not of achievement, but of admittedly bereft piece of work, for work lonely will efface the footsteps of work" (p. 321). Whistler thus severed the connection betwixt labor and value-whether aesthetic, economical, or ethical-cardinal to much midcentury art.

Through these instance studies, Barringer explores two key themes. The kickoff holds that the visual image "provided the most powerful and significant formulation of work equally the nexus of ethical and artful value" (pp. 1-2), thus rejecting the notion of an paradigm every bit a surplus reiteration of issues articulated in other cultural forms, namely texts. So, for example, in the case of Dark-brown`due south Work, Barringer argues for the painting equally an active, "powerful, visual intervention in debates on work and gender that engages, rivals, and exceeds, rather than merely imitating or illustrating, the prose works of Thomas Carlyle or John Ruskin" (pp. 26-27). The second theme, "the complex relationship betwixt art and labour in theory and practice in the mid-nineteenth century" (p. two), is borne out in each case study only is maybe made near vivid by the career of Godfrey Svkes, who attended and so later taught at the Sheffield School of Design, founded with the explicit purpose of reforming both design and artisans. The frieze he produced for the Mechanics` Establish (which shared the mission of the design school) amalgamates the classical idiom with representations of Sheffield trades, producing a "highly original contribution to the iconography of labour" that withal "conforms to the reformist ideological project of the establishment" (p. 221). At the Due south Kensington Museum, Barringer maintains, Sykes was again "endorsed by and assimilated into the cloth of the Victorian state appliance," all the same his obituaries did not agree regarding his position in guild (p. 235). The ideology of improvement failed to secure his identity.

The themes Barringer chose for investigation immediately retrieve the question of context. In this respect, the author sets the bar loftier, every bit he intends to "locate images of labour in a broad historical and cultural matrix that reveals their complexities and fragilities" (p. 2). He creates boundaries for this matrix by focusing on the period of 1851 to 1878, which historian William Laurence Burn dubbed the "age of equipoise." Barringer adapts the phrase to draw the "historical moment of balance-mayhap better thought of equally a hostile stalemate-betwixt broader historical forces; the traditional privileges of men and the mounting demands of women; labour and capital letter; industry and agriculture; hand-made and machine manufacturing; city and country; provinces and metropolis; purple middle and colonial periphery" (p. xiii). This attention to issues of gender, capitalism, economical development, and imperialism, all of which constituted important dynamics in the flow nether question, notwithstanding remind united states of america that each generation constructs context in its own image, every bit almost midcentury writers on Victorian art did not concern themselves with these bug.7 To tease out the meanings of the studied works, Barringer frequently deploys a process of differentiation, as suggested by this list of paired concepts; overall, he describes his projection equally an exam of "the dialectic of art and labour" (p. 2). The larger web of economic, social, and political factors shaping this dialectic is changeful rather than static: for example, in his discussion of colonial Gothic, Barringer eschews the trope of sharply distinguished middle and periphery to describe a fluid trafficking of "ideas, images, and objects . . . binding together coloniser and colonised," borne out in the dialogue between British medievalism and the decorative arts of Bharat plant in William Morris`s textile designs (pp. 250, 294-95). His readings are often multivalent: for case, the centrally positioned laborer in Chocolate-brown`southward Piece of work, statuesquely posed with a rose between his teeth, is "simultaneously real and allegorical, modern and classical, martial and gentle, proletarian and noble, masculine and beautiful" (p. 41).

Such a reading, which takes into account prevailing artistic conventions (the emerging idiom of realism and (lie rest oi classicism) every bit well as social factors ol gender and class, is indicalive ol Barriiiger`due south aim to develop "a disquisitional iconography of the working homo" through contextual readings and I`ormal assay (pp. 2, 17). The ambition of such a projection is underscored by Mieke BaI and Norman Ury-son`south critique of the art historian`due south quest for context thai utilizes mid-Victorian paintings such equally those considered by Barringer. The typical fine art historical maneuver, BaI and Bryson assert, would be to work outward lrom the scenes depicted (propelled, i could add, by the realist language utilized by the artists). The result is a son ol closed circumvolve, since "the `context` in which the work ol ail is placed is in (act being generated oui of lhe work itself."eight Yet without the image Io attend to, context is seemingly endless. Moreover, "information technology cannot be taken for granted thai the evidence thai makes up `context` is going to be whatsoever simpler or more legible than the visual lexl upon which such evidence is to operate."9 In reference to Work, Elizabelh Prellejohn has constitute that there is an "abundance of explanatory textual material," and therefore "we might expect the estimation of lhe image to exist straightforward, just in exercise lhe contrary has been the case."10 In the face of these difficulties, Lisa Tickner has pointed to the necessary "skill ... in sifting from what is plainly mere `background information` that which is simply `groundwork` to ux-because we have to reach for information technology outside the frame |of the image]- pecker was one time lor anisl and audience part of the laken-for-granled of lhe painting itself."11

Barriiiger`s strength lies in reaching across the frame in terms of artistic agency. For example, Wiirk is shown Io be both Chocolate-brown`s commentary on contemporaneous debates regarding hierarchies of labor and morality and a self-statement registered "abstractly past the conceptual power of his analysis and concretely by every inch of lhe painting`s meticulous facture" (p. Hl). Barringer reveals the paradoxes that plagued Cole`s and Linncll`south projects Io produce mimetic, on-the-spot accounts of harvesting while also creating an image of lhe countryside as a site advisable for urban pleasure seekers rallier than a place of labor and class disharmonize and exploitation. Linnell`southward solution was to purchase a rural esiale in Surrey lhat he managed, in all probability, co-ordinate to lhe subjects required for his paintings. With regard to Sharpies, Barringer is attentive Io lhe "historical specificity of his situation, his affiliations, and aspirations" that led him Io attain precarious status in the labor elite (p. 137).

In reconstructing context, Barringer as well draws on a vast visual annal while paying heed to the inlended venue and audience for individual objects (although, al points, a more in-depth consideration of the paths and modes of circulation of graphic imagery would have been helpful). For case, with respect to dole`s Harvest Time-Painted on Holmbury Hill, 1860, Barringer develops its pregnant by juxtaposing information technology with Pieter Biuegel the Elder`due south The Harvesters, 1565; a chromolithograph of lhe agriculture hall from lhe Greal Exhibilion; wood engravings of gang labor from lhe illustrated periodical lhe Graphic; contemporaneous representations of rural labor also executed in the realisi idiom; and images from farming manuals. Although the ostensible subject of analysis is an oil painting, the traditionally privileged medium of an history, Barringcr does nol slim in his dissection of mass-produced images, as evidenced by his thoughtful observations on a forest engraving of a threshing automobile (pp. 100-101).

Barringer accentuates two additional elements (although these do non exhaust his resources) that would accept been easily taken for granted by mid-Victorian artists and audiences and however lie exterior our frame of reference today, especially for an American readership: the local and religion. I utilise the term limit to announce those siies where artists lived and worked too as the iools and processes past which they wielded their Hades, since, as Barringer demonstrates in the case of Sheffield, identify and applied science often went mitt in hand. The author by and large wears this knowledge lightly, whether explaining types of labor in London, the lag in agronomical innovation in Surrey, the smithing trade in Blackburn, the worn-down knife grinders of Sheffield, or village pottery traditions in India. These sites were variously inflected by Victorian theology, intertwining Christianity, piece of work, and masculinity (p. 56). Barringer`due south narrative lakes place before the widespread touch of Darwinism, when nature could still be conceived as proof of God`s being and "harvest equally divinely ordained labour" (pp. 127, 129). For readers today, the ascent of technology and belief in divine order portend the clash of ii worldviews nosotros continue to experience; Barringer`s text reveals how these two systems coexisted in the mid-Viclorian period.

Returning to the question of context, Bal and Bryson advocate pluralism in recognition of diversity in time, place, and discipline of reception.12 Here`due south lhe rub. For while Barringer is careful to situale his objects of assay in the warp and woof of their original moment of production, he cannot escape the fuel that he is a twenty-firsl-centuiy viewer. This leads Io some readings thai might accept never occurred Io the Victorians: lor example, in reference to Sharples`s Portrait of fames Cmssland with His Wife and Kid, Susanna Crossland is described as deferential and nervous equally compared with her determined, responsible spouse (p. 147); the Sheffield grinder sketched by Henry Ferlee Parker is characterized equally self-possessed and militant (p. 205); and the Indian artisan represented in the painting Bakshiram by Rudolf Swoboda has a "distant wait in his rheumy eyes" suggesting "disdain or atheism at his peculiar environment" (p. 303). I point to these modest readings of objects lor which in that location is likely no recorded criticism to reinforce the challenge we continually face in establishing meaning.

The value of Barringcr`s book extends beyond (he broad range of knowledge he has assembled to decipher and discuss his case studies. In his introduction, Barringer starting time indicates his intent to bring back class into "the very heart of fine art-historical analysis, though in a revised and more than nuanced definition detached from lhe determinism of Marxist theory" (p. fourteen). This aspiration is meritorious, merely it is worth noting dial historians such as Harold IYrkin have offered viable analyses of class without working within the Marxist paradigm.13 Second, Barringer conceives his text as contributing to gender studies and, more specifically, the examination of masculinity, which he aims to show as "contingent, conflicted and multiple" rather than hegemonic (p. 15). He is about successful on this score in his give-and-take of Brown`s Piece of work, the male harvesters represented by Cole and Linnell, and the blacksmiths of Sharples`south milieu; this narrative thread wanes in afterward chapters (indeed, I would like to know whether the bodies of the Indian craftsmen-either in physical embodiment or representation-had any inipaci on British notions of masculinity) and thru reemerges with Whistler. This is not an overtly theorized account, but information technology adds significantly to our knowledge of nineteenth-century masculinily and could exist productively aligned with contempo literature by such authors equally Martin Berger, Randall Griffin, and Michael Hatt.xiv Ooncomitantly, Barringer engages with the question of artistic identity, underscoring how Whistler`southward identity as a dandy and cosmopolitan undermined earlier manifestations of the laboring artist especially evident in Brown`s canvases.1`` Third, Barringer positions his work as advancing the newly emergent field of imperial studies, and perhaps here he most successfully demonstrates that the visual-in the form of colonial Gothic-offers a unique form of historical analysis that must exist reckoned wilh. Fourth, Barringer acknowledges thai his book will add to social art history (and the ways in which he frames his project think T. J. dark`s espousal of social art history), yet Barringer states that, above all, he wishes his lext to be regarded equally a "contribution to the history of art" (peradventure splitting hairs; p. 17). To this listing, I would add cultural geography, as Barringer`s attenliveness to the local environment correlates with the work of such scholars equally Stephen Daniels. And, last, the history of collecting and museums (although these terms practice not appear in the alphabetize), as Barringer provides insight into Victorian patronage and, fifty-fifty more significantly, such Victorian institutions as the Gild of St. George`s Museum, Sheffield, and the Oxford Museum-these latter shaped by the ideas of John Ruskin-and the Victoria and Albert Museum. In bespeak of fact, many of the objects in Barringer`s study come from the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, such as Linnell`s Harvest Moon (1855), Sharples`s steel plate for The Forge, Frederic Leighton`south The Arts of Manufacture every bit Practical to State of war, Sykes`s refreshment room, and John Lockwood Kipling`s pen-and-ink studies of Indian craftsmen, and the author`s investigations establish how a dialogue between domestic and imperial agendas influenced the institution. A well-researched, thoughtfully considered, and amply produced written report, Men at Work volition be valuable reading for toilers in these fields besides equally scholars of nineteenth-century art.

FOOTNOTE

Notes ane. Susan Casteras, Images of Victorian Womanhood in English An (Rutherford, NJ.: Fairleigh Dickinson Academy Press; London: Associated Academy Presses, 1987); Susan P. Casteras and Hilarie Faberman, The Substance or the Shadow: Images of Victorian Womanhood, exh. cat., Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 1982; Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (London: Routledge, 1993); and Kristina Huneault, Difficult Subjects: Working Women and Visual Civilization, Uk 1880-1914 (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2002). 2. See, for example, Sylvia Wolf et al., Julia Margaret Cameron`s Women, exh. cat., Art Institute of Chicago, 1998; and Stephanie Brownish and Colin Trodd, eds., Representations of K. F. Watts: Fine art Making in Victorian Civilization (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004). 3. Francis Donald Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution (London: N. Carrington, 1947). For examples of history texts, meet Maxine Berg, The Age of Manufactures, 1700-1820: industry, Innovation and Work in Britain, 2d ed. (London: Routledge, 1994); Eric J. Evans, The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain, 1783-1870 (London: Longman, 1983); Christine MacLeod, Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English language Patent Systems, 1660-1800 (New York: Cambridge Academy Press, 1988); Joel Mokyr, ?d., The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective (Boulder, CoIo.: Westview Printing, 1999); and Eastward. A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Modify: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 4. Stephen Daniels, "Joseph Wright and the Spectacle of Power," in Fields of Vision: Mural Imagery and National Identity in England and the United states (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 43-79. 5. For a recent example, run into William South. Rodner, J. M. W. Turner, Romantic Painter of the Industrial Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 6. Daniels, "Joseph Wright," 44. seven. See, for example, Jeremy Maas, Victorian Painters (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1969). Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 257, underscores the fact that "in exercise well-nigh art historians have chosen contexts not and so much because they are historically relevant as because they correspond to present-day concerns." Yet she is conscientious to notation, "this is past no means to be deplored. Current scholars continually show how Pre-Raphaelite pictures are not immured in the circumstances of their making, but can continue making visible interventions into today`s concerns and those of futurity generations." 8. Mieke BaI and Norman Bryson, "Semiotics and Art History," Art Bulletin 73 (1991): 178. nine. Ibid., 177. ten. Prettejohn, Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, 234. eleven. Lisa Tickner, Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale Academy Press, 2000), 311 northward. 138. 12. BaI and Bryson, "Semiotics and Art History," 179. thirteen. Harold Perkin, Origins oj Modern English Society (1969; New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986). xiv. See, for case, Martin A. Berger, ???Fabricated: Thomas Eakins and the Construction of Aureate Age Manhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Randall C. Griffin, "Thomas Eakins`southward Construction of the Male Torso, or `Men Become to Know Each Other across the Space of Time,` " Oxford Art Periodical 18 (1995): 70-lxxx; and Michael Hatt, "Muscles, Morals, Mind: The Male person Body in Thomas Eakins` Salutat," in The Body Imagined: The Human Class and Visual Culture since the Renaissance, ed. Kathleen Adler and Marcia Pointon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 57-69. xv. For a fuller account, run into Andrew Stephenson, "Refashioning Modern Masculinity: Whistler, Aestheticism, and National Identity," in English Art 1860-1914: Modern Artists and Identity, ed. David Peters Corbett (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000), 133-49, 243-45.

AUTHOR AFFILIATION

ANNE HELMREICH is associate professor of art history at instance Western Reserve University [Department of Art History and Art, example Western Reserve University, 11201 Euclid Artery, Cleveland, Ohio 44106-7110].

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