Work (c1859). Oil on canvas. 137 x 197. Work is a painting by Ford Madox Brown that is generally considered to be his most important achievement. It exists in two versions. The painting attempts to portray, both literally and analytically, the totality of the Victorian social system and the transition from a rural to an urban economy. Brown began the painting in 1852 and completed it in 1865, when he set up a special exhibition to show it along with several of his other works. He wrote a detailed catalogue explaining the significance of the picture. The painting was commissioned by Thomas Plint, a well-known collector of Pre-Raphaelite art, who died before its completion. A second version, smaller at 684 × 990 mm, was commissioned in 1859 and completed in 1863. This is now in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. It is closely similar, though for the lady with a blue parasol the face of Maria Leathart, the commissioner's wife, replaces that of Mrs Brown in the Manchester version. The picture depicts a group of so-called navvies digging up the road to build a tunnel. It is typically assumed that this was part of the extensions of London's sewerage system, which were being undertaken to deal with the threat of typhus and cholera. The workers are in the centre of the painting. On either side of them are individuals who are either unemployed or represent the leisured classes. Behind the workers are two wealthy figures on horseback, whose progress along the road has been halted by the excavations. The painting also portrays an election campaign, evidenced by posters and people carrying sandwich boards with the name of the candidate Bobus. A poster also draws attention to the potential presence of a burglar. The setting is an accurate depiction of The Mount on Heath Street in Hampstead, London, where a side road rises up above the main road and runs alongside it. Brown made a detailed study of the location in 1852. Brown explained that he had intended to demonstrate that the modern British workman could be as fit a subject for art as the more supposedly picturesque Italian lazarone. He set the painting on Heath Street in Hampstead, of which he made a detailed study. Hampstead was at the time a wealthy area on the outskirts of London, which was undergoing rapid expansion. The development of the new sewerage and drainage systems in the city was also widely discussed in the press as an agent of modernisation. The character of Bobus appears in the writings of Thomas Carlyle as the epitome of a corrupt businessman who uses his money to market himself as a politician. Brown's principal artistic model was the work of William Hogarth, in particular his paintings Humours of an Election and his prints Beer Street and Gin Lane. The Election paintings depicted both the vitality and the corruption of British society, while the prints set up a contrast between poverty and prosperity. While working on the painting Brown founded the Hogarth club to link artists who saw themselves as Hogarth's admirers and followers. The rustic aspects of the composition draw on the established tradition of the picturesque, epitomised by the work of artists such as John Constable and William Collins. The satirical and critical aspects of Hogarth's style work in tandem with Brown's Pre-Raphaelitism, with its intense concentration on the complication of the pictorial surface in conflicting details. This image of potentially violent and jarring confrontation is set in opposition to the social harmony and deference epitomised by the picturesque tradition. The principal figure of the young workman is shovelling soil from a platform hanging in a hole onto a large pile behind him. Beneath him in the underground shaft another workman is digging the soil and shovelling it onto the platform. He is only visible in the form of a hand and a shovel appearing from the hole. To his right an older navvy is seen shovelling unsifted lime into a sieve. The fine powder accumulates in a pile on the left. The lime is to be used to make mortar which is being mixed by other navvies at the right of the composition. A hodcarrier, visible behind the main navvy, is transporting bricks down into the hole. The sheet floating in front of him is a copy of a religious tract handed to him by the lady in the blue bonnet at the left, who is attempting to evangelise the navvies. She is carrying copies of a tract called The Hodman's Haven or Drink for Thirsty Souls. The reference to drink in the title reflects the emergence of the temperance movement. A navvy on the right, swigging beer, emphasises their rejection of teetotalism. The woman in front of the evangelist represents genteel glamour-a fashionable lady whose only job is to look beautiful.