Madox Brown, Hicks, and Clausen: the Construction Site in Victorian High Art

From the Medieval period onwards a series of artists in many different countries have represented construction work in a range of mediums including oil painting, watercolour, aquatint, chalk, crayon, engraving, etching, pencil and ink drawing. Some of this work has been produced by famous artists whilst others are almost completely anonymous or rarely seen. The number of such images probably runs into the thousands. Opinions differ among construction historians as to the value of such art as historical documents. This paper considers how three famous English Victorian painters - Ford Madox Brown (1821–1893), Sir George Clausen (1852-1944) and George Elgar Hicks (1824-1914) – chose to depict construction and whether their art throws any light on what building work was really like in the past.