Work and industry

For most of history most people have worked with their hands, in the fields, in the workshop or in the home. For a long time they were only incidental figures in art, but over time work became a subject in its own right. We follow it from the labours of the months in medieval art by way of Bruegel, Velázquez and Millet to Menzel’s rolling mill, Repin’s barge haulers and the factories of the 20th century.

• Field and workshop – antiquity and the Middle Ages
• Market and harvest – the 16th century
• Spinners and smiths – the 17th century
• Fire and iron – the 18th century and the Industrial Revolution
• Peasants and stone breakers – Realism
• Factories and rivers – modern work
• Fishermen, slash-and-burn farmers and workers – the Nordic countries
• Machine and man – the 20th century and today