As the cases of Cunningham and Elliott demonstrate, there is a strong tendency towards verbal portraiture in the method by which Carlyle isolates artisanal characteristics. This chapter turns from the case of a writer who redescribes his vocation in visual terms to that of an artist who portrays Carlyle himself, and who likewise indemnifies intellectual labour by making it visible. Ford Madox Brown is best known for his large-scale canvas, Work (1852–65) [Figure 2.1], a painting much studied by art critics, and routinely seen as visualising a central Victorian value. Yet the circumstances of its composition contain a commentary not only on the fraught connection between the labour of mind and the hand of the artist, but also on the difficulties encountered by a discourse of authenticity that relies on processes of representation, staging and demonstration.

In its final form, Work depicts a group of navvies mending a road who are watched from one side by likenesses of Carlyle and F. D. Maurice. It is an arrangement that differs markedly from the design that first inspired the commission of its patron, Thomas Plint [Figure 2.2].

Apparently unhappy with the painter figure who originally stood at the sidelines, Plint asked Brown ‘to introduce both Carlyle and Kingsley’ in substitution. He duly contacted Carlyle to arrange a sitting, and quietly discarded the suggestion of Kingsley in favour of Maurice. The legal complications arising from Plint’s death in 1861 ensured that it was not until 1865 that the painting could appear in public. In that year it was shown as the centrepiece of a one-man retrospective, ‘The Exhibition of Work, and other Paintings’ (‘The Gallery’, Piccadilly, 1865), an event whose billing simultaneously describes a specific painting and testifies to all the artistic effort it involved. The self-authored catalogue that Brown published to mark the event discloses a related double logic, resembling as it does interpretative art criticism as much as exhibition or sales description.

Among the commentaries that Brown includes, the long entry on Work stands out. Amid the action and colour of the street scene, he identifies ‘the British excavator or navvy’ as the ‘outward and visible type of work’. Meanwhile, Plint’s concern with personality recedes in favour of delineating ‘types and not individuals’.