Brown spent thirteen years on a single painting. Work (1852 to 1865) attempted to catalogue the entire social structure of Victorian England in one canvas: navvies digging, gentlemen watching, a flower seller, a street preacher, intellectuals (Thomas Carlyle and F.D. Maurice are identifiable), and layers of commentary on who labours and who benefits.

He was born in Calais in 1821, trained across Europe, and settled in London. Though never an official member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he was their most important older ally and the teacher who most shaped their ambitions. His insistence on painting outdoors in natural light, often to the point of physical discomfort, and his dense, moralising compositions made him a bridge between the Nazarenes he had studied with in Rome and the young English radicals who followed.

He also designed stained glass and furniture for Morris and Co. He died in 1893, at seventy-two.