Work

Work is a subject in art. The gallery holds 77 works in this subject in art, including works by Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, Edgar Degas and William Sidney Mount.

Work—the depiction of human labour—is among the oldest sustained themes in Western art, rooted in the agricultural cycle that governed pre-modern life. Medieval illuminators and cathedral sculptors codified it in the "Labours of the Months," pairing each season with its characteristic task: sowing, reaping, pressing grapes, slaughtering swine. These images were as much moral and devotional as documentary, presenting toil as the ordained rhythm of a well-ordered world and a counterpart to the leisure of the nobility.

The theme matured in the Low Countries. Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Harvesters (1565), one of a six-panel series of the seasons painted for the Antwerp merchant Niclaes Jongelinck, treats peasants harvesting and eating wheat with unidealised naturalism; the Metropolitan Museum calls it a watershed and among the first modern landscapes. In the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, genre painting elevated humble domestic work to quiet dignity—Nicolaes Maes, following his teacher Rembrandt, bathed a maid in warm light in Young Woman Peeling Apples (c. 1655), lending ordinary chores an almost devotional gravity.

In the eighteenth century the Rococo absorbed labour into pastoral fantasy, as in François Boucher's decorative Washerwomen, where toil becomes graceful idyll. A more documentary impulse surfaced in American genre painting—William Sidney Mount's Cider Making (1840–41) records a Long Island cider mill while carrying coded political meaning. The decisive shift came with French Realism: Gustave Courbet's Stonebreakers and Jean-François Millet's The Gleaners (1857), which showed three poor women gathering leftover grain with monumental seriousness. By treating the rural poor on a scale once reserved for history and myth, these works scandalised bourgeois critics who read in them the spectre of revolution.

Industrialisation pushed the subject into the city and the factory. Gustave Caillebotte's The Floor Scrapers (1875), among the first paintings of the urban proletariat, was rejected by the Salon as vulgar, while Adolph Menzel's The Iron Rolling Mill (1872–75) confronted the machine age directly. Camille Pissarro's Fan Mount: The Cabbage Gatherers and Charles Frederick Ulrich's Glass Blowers of Murano (1886), celebrating multigenerational craft, extend the tradition. Its legacy runs through Van Gogh's peasants to twentieth-century Social Realism and the murals of the WPA, where work became a defining emblem of modern collective life.