On Seeing and Being Seen: Beholding Class in Ford Madox Brown’s Work

In 1852 Ford Madox Brown stood on a street in London watching the navvies who would form the central focus of Work. Some seventy years later Jacques Lacan sat in a boat off the Brittany coast observing sardine fishermen at work. This article asks what we might learn by thinking about these well-known moments together. In each case a middle-class beholder imagines that he is on the side of the workers yet finds himself confronted by the unbridgeable distance that divides his position from theirs, and in each case this separation is figured most clearly in the gaze that the workers direct back towards the beholder. The article opens with an analysis of the class dynamics that structure Lacan’s account of the sardine can episode, arguing that it was his awareness of being seen by the fishermen as much as by the light famously reflecting from the floating can that made him aware of being out of place in the scene. Work, which implicates the viewer in a series of exchanged glances that revolve around the divisions inherent in class, raises similar questions as to who belongs in the picture and how one might identify (or not) with those one surveys. On the basis of a close reading of the spaces and looks depicted in Work and an analysis of the operation of the gaze in Brown’s Take Your Son, Sir! (considered in relation to Jean-Paul Sartre’s discussion of the shame of being seen), the article argues that the picture Brown offers of class and, more importantly, the place his painting affords the beholder are both more complex and more contradictory than has hitherto been recognized. Thinking about Lacan and Sartre helps us to see this. In return, Brown’s work suggests ways in which theorizations of the gaze and subjectivity might be complicated by considerations of class.