ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Brown idealized working-class, muscular manual labor as compensation for the experience of working as an artist, which was fraught with tension, self-doubt and anxiety. Ruskin takes the same Biblical injunction to labor that Brown inscribed on the frame of his painting ‘in the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread,’ but tries to reinterpret it in the context of ‘happy work’ rather than labor as a punishment for sin. The excessive cleanliness of the workers in the painting was remarked on by contemporary critics. Stallybrass and White in the The Politics and Poetics of Transgression analyze the middle-class emphasis on the separation of dirt as a moral imperative that made dirty, sweaty labor like that found in Munby’s photographs into a transgression of boundaries. The idealized status of this form of masculine labor is indicated in the sonnet that he composed to accompany his painting Work depicts labor as a masculine ideal.
