The Sweat of Their Face
The Sweat of Their Face: Portraying American Workers By David C. Ward and
Dorothy Moss (Smithsonian Books). 240 pages, $39.95.
The Sweat of their Face: Portraying American Workers serves as the companion volume for the exhibition of the same name that opened at the National Portrait Gallery this past November. This wonderful book provides a visual history of the American worker through paintings, sculpture and photographs from colonial times until the present day, including Winslow Homer, John Neagle, Henry Inman, Lilly Martin Spencer, Thomas Waterman Wood, John George Brown and Jefferson David Chalfant, as well as contemporary artists such as Richard Avedon,
Janet Biggs, John Sonsini and Ramiro Gomez.
One of the earliest paintings in the exhibition is Neagle’s Pat Lyon at the Forge on loan from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Painted in 1829, the work depicts Lyon as a blacksmith surrounded by the various objects of the trade. Early in his career, Lyon had been accused of robbing a bank and spent three years in prison. He sued his accusers and eventually won, and the incident left a severe impression on him as well as a disdain for the upper class. Of this painting, he said, “I do not desire to be represented in the picture as a gentleman— to which character I have no pretension. I want you to paint me at work at my anvil, with my sleeves rolled up and a leather apron on.”
As the Smithsonian states, “This richly illustrated book charts the rise and fall of labor from the empowered artisan of the eighteenth century through industrialization and the current American business climate, in which industrial jobs have all but disappeared.”