Photographers, musicians, harvesters, foresters, booksellers and propagandists, and tinkers from the roads of the past.
workers
Bosch’s two wayfarers, Courbet’s Stone Breakers, and wonderful paintings by Brett, Troyon and Ford Madox Brown show those who lived on the road.
Belgium was heavily industrialised: he shows its coal miners, including women, their villages, steel foundries, and more.
From 1880, artists concentrated on social aspects of work. They questioned whether young children should be at work, and the role of the worker in society.
With the Industrial Revolution, painters started to depict the furnaces and factories which grew rapidly across Europe and North America. This selection runs to 1879.
