7 Classic Artworks That Show What Work Was Like Before the Internet

Ever wondered what work was like before the internet was invented? Was work burnout also a thing back then? How was information gathered or data analyzed? What about the stock market? How were prices tracked? Did others work well with each other, or were office politics an issue only for the present?

Can Paintings Show Us What Work Was Like Before the Internet?

I find that one way to see into the past is by looking at artwork. Paintings capture a moment in time, and each piece is equivalent to a time capsule. As we gaze at the painting, we find more and more things that provide a hint into the past. At the time, artists may not have created their work with the intention to preserve the past, and so the happy accident left us with the ability to travel through time to understand the world of back then.

And so, with that understanding, I choose to learn of workplace matters of the past using paintings like the ones below:

1. Dürer’s Saint Jerome in His Study (1521): What Did Focused Work Look Like?

Dürer’s copper engraving captures Saint Jerome perfectly engrossed in his work. In this scene, Jerome is surrounded by his home possessions, which are highlighted by the sun’s rays coming through his arched window. Saint Jerome’s study is airy and full of items, yet much space is given to them. The items are nicely laid out; they hang in a particular place or lie at a particular angle. For example, the saint’s hat hangs neatly behind his head, ready for retrieval when needed. The books on the bench and sill lie spine up, a purposeful placement. Not only that, there are two animals in the foreground that lie peacefully as their master works.

In contrast, the saint is focused on his work, as it happens to most of us today, but Dürer provides us with small reminders of the reason behind our work, where we consider time to be valuable and something we give up for pay. This reminder hangs on the wall behind Saint Jerome’s head. The skull on the sill represents the inevitable end of our life, where no matter how much work we put into something, we’ll never have enough time to complete all that came to mind. Dürer captures exactly what being hard at work was like in the 1500s: in the moment, focused, while life passes us by, but the work is important enough to ignore the present and continue on.

2. Vermeer’s The Astronomer (1668): How Did People Find Information Before Search Engines?

Not long ago, in the early eighties, most Americans gathered information using books, radio, newspapers, and other physical media and forms of education. You’d have to inquire who was the expert in such-and-such area of study, learn from them, ask them questions, and search for a mentor. In Johannes Vermeer’s The Astronomer, you can see an actual celestial globe as the central point of the oil-on-canvas painting created in the mid-1600s. The light from the window brings your eyes to the globe, a rare, mostly unseen item today. These globes and maps were used to show terrain, countries, and oceans for navigation and travel purposes and, in this case, the celestial globe was used to study the stars.

Astronomers would perform complex calculations using geometry, trigonometry, or logarithms to predict the positions of planets, moons, comets, and solar eclipses. Here is another example of work being done at home, by hand. They were funded by royalty, wealthy patrons, or universities to make stronger telescopes, among many other things, and to create horoscopes using astrology for their funders.

3. Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers (1875): How Did Workers Share Skills Before YouTube?

Manual labor in the late 1800s was a main source of work for most people. Even during the Industrial Revolution, when this scene takes place, laborers were still an essential cog in the economic machine at that time. Most people were in manual labor at factories, in construction, and in other blue-collar work. Gustave Caillebotte captures movement using the angle of the wood panels that align with the arms of the male subjects at the edge of the room. Here, there was no cloud storage. Data and information were shared from the minds of the workers through conversation in the workplace. There’s no computer in sight in this scene, except the minds of the workers who work together to scrape the floor of old paint. The skill set was taught and passed on amongst each other and not learned from YouTube.

4. Degas’ A Cotton Office in New Orleans (1873): How Did Markets Work Before Digital Tickers?

Could you imagine having to buy stock or manage your retirement portfolio using paper and trusting a broker over the phone to purchase what you requested and provide accurate prices? In Degas’ scene above, this oil painting captures how the cotton market functioned in the 1870s. Here, multiple men who are related to Degas sit and wait around for a sale of some sort. In the South, where the scene takes place, cotton was very important to the New Orleans economy, and so the sale of cotton was a good business to be in.

You can see a man reading a newspaper, likely to keep up with important economic information or current events, men sifting through paper, and others waiting for something to happen. The scene seems busy, but on a close look, most of the staff isn’t doing much or selling anything to anyone. Could it have been that foot traffic was what caused cotton to sell at this establishment? No phone in sight, not even a typewriter—a simpler time to sell goods, yet because fewer people were informed of the cotton office, less would sell.

5. Hopper’s Office at Night (1940): Did Burnout and Late Nights Exist Before Screens?

Here in the 1940s, there’s a familiar yellow film of light that stresses out anyone who’s under it. The incandescent scene takes place at night, depicting two office employees clearly working overnight. The lamp lights up the male professional’s work in hand, with the woman looking at him, awaiting direction, while going through the filing cabinet. A few things we don’t see much of anymore: the filing cabinet.

While some businesses still use them, most store files on a PC today. To the left of the man, a phone is wired to the wall, ready to be picked up at any ring. Today, the phone has been digitized into a personal or work cell phone or even call center software where you can call any number via the internet. The desk opposite the man’s has a typewriter on it, without a page inserted. You can see in this scene that although the technology was outdated—yet somewhat familiar—burnout and late hours still existed in the past; it was just felt in a different way.

6. Turzak’s Man with Drill (1932): Which Jobs Have Never Been Automated?

Charles Turzak’s woodblock prints have a unique way of striking attention. The zigzag shapes representing lightning and buzz all wrap around the focal point, the man with the drill. It’s this worker, the one the bystanders in the print stare at, who builds the skyscrapers in the background. The zigzag shapes connect the buildings to the worker and identify their creator. Turzak captures movement in this piece by having vibrating lines come off the laborer and drill that spread across the scene. The reason I chose to share this piece is that, unlike the globe in The Astronomer, the construction worker is still an essential role that hasn’t been automated out, with tools that have stayed consistently the same up to today.

7. Dalí’s Portrait of Mr. Emilio Terry (1930): Could Anyone See the Future of Work Coming?

Salvador Dalí’s Portrait of Mr. Emilio Terry is an unfinished piece that provides a surreal depiction of office work of the past. The red-suited man in the scene uses paper and pen to write down his thoughts on a desk in an office, which would have been normal procedure back in the 1930s. Today, most people take notes on software rather than paper, but the eerie theme Dalí shares here is that Mr. Emilio Terry looks out and forward toward a sculpture of a futuristic form with a piano attached to it. The form resembles the shapes of ships, missiles, and fossils, and seems to drip brass but is made of multiple media. It’s as if he is in the past, looking at the future of industry.

What Has Changed About Work, and What Hasn’t?

The scenes depicted in these pieces are time capsules of the way of the worker in the past. Most things have changed, such as our technology, but few things remain the same. Information is still needed, and although data is no longer primarily absorbed through books, newspapers, or mentorship, today it is searched using AI, a search engine, or a website.

Work is still work, and although the job market may change and the type of work the economy needs has evolved, human beings still need to create and labor for their economies. The stock market, or market economy, was slower-paced and done by hand. While it still exists, it’s now an instant data business that doesn’t take a middleman to take part in any longer. And of course, late nights and burnout existed back then, but in a different way. People picked up calls and typewrote all correspondence, unlike today. While we still use a keyboard, most of what we type isn’t printed on paper.

The jobs of laborers, construction workers, and painters have yet to be automated out. There used to be people called computers who would compute interest rates and other equations for banks or the stock market, and they have been replaced by a digital asset, but like the man with the drill, today we still see the same man.