ART AND COAL

Art and Coal

In 1982 and 1983 an exhibition was organised by the Arts Council of Great Britain with the National Coal Board and supported by Barclays Bank: Coal - British mining in art 1680-1980.

The exhibition was shown at five locations around Great Britain: Stoke on Trent; Swansea; London; Durham; and Nottingham. 

An illustrated catalogue of the exhibition - Coal: British mining in art 1680-1980 - was published.  This is a personal summary of the section of the catalogue entitled ‘Art and Coal’, written by Douglas Gray. 

Art and Coal

The 150 pictures in the exhibition depict fully coal mining in the British Isles in the period 1680 – 1980.  Each of these works shows the artist’s response to coal.

The seminal image of the Industrial Revolution

The publication of Georg Agricola’s De Re Metallica in the 16^th Century marks Europe as the originator of a new view on life: the use of illustration to describe metal mining.  Contemporary artists and craftspeople also showed aspects of miners and mining. 

The painting by Peter Hartover, dated 1680, of Harraton Hall and Lumley Castle in County Durham ‘should be considered as the seminal image of the Industrial Revolution’, although it was not until a further 70 years had passed (ie. in 1750) that ‘artistic imagination and temperament are stirred again’ with Abraham Darby’s paintings of iron foundries and smelting furnaces in the ‘picturesqueness’ of Coalbrookdale, in Shropshire – the ‘cradle of the industrial revolution’.  Darby gives prominence to the ‘heat and light’ of ironworking, whilst the ‘damp and darkness’ of coal mining is relegated to the representation of ‘remotely situated coal pits’.

Edmund Burke’s Inquiry into the Origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was published in 1757. 

The first painting of a coal mine

The first ‘realistic representation of a coal mine’ dates from 1788: George Robertson’s ‘painting of the mouth of a coal pit near Broseley’ which now only exists as a print published in 1788 by Francis Chesham.  It seems that this work was never exhibited.

The first painting of a coal mine that was exhibited appears to be William Williams’ pair that were shown in 1788: they are both views of Coalbrookdale.  In one of the paintings the pastoral idyll is being replaced by the needs of industry: ‘the first inevitable step from picturesque landscape to industrial wasteland’. 

‘Wild romantic scenery’

Artists in the late 18^th Century were also seeking ‘wild romantic scenery’ elsewhere in the British Isles’.  Paul Sandby – ‘a less passionate artist than those who had visited Shropshire’ – painted collieries in Wales in about 1775 / 76 in a ‘cool and restrained way’. 

Other artists visited Wales at this time in search of romantic subjects and they ‘have bequeathed a major legacy of industrial paintings and drawings that are unique in art history’.  These show all the aspects of industrial enterprise in Wales at that time including the coal industry.  These artists are listed as: John Hassell, George Robertson, George Samuel, Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, J M W Turner (who was there in 1792, 1795 and 1798); Francois Louis Francia; William Havell; and John Laporte.  But the landscape setting of all these artists’ works in the late 18^th Century / early 19^th Century is the rural environment, and there is no hint of the national significance of what is depicted.  Social realism was precluded by the factors of the dominant aesthetic philosophy, the pressures of patronage and the desires of the art market. 

The widening availability of printed publications in the early 19^th Century enabled a broadening of awareness of the realities of coal mining.  Three significant publications were: W H Pyne’s Microcosm; George Walker’s Costume of Yorkshire; and William Daniell’s A Voyage Round Great Britain.  Walker includes an illustration showing a miner in a mining landscape which includes a colliery, a steam winder, and a train of coal wagons hauled by a locomotive.  Pyne shows coal mining in the ‘archaic’ style of Sandby.  Daniell travelled with Richard Ayton from Lands End to Whitehaven from 1813 to 1823.  At Whitehaven Ayton visited the William Pit and Daniell sketched ‘on the windswept quay’  Ayton described his experience of being underground in the coal mine: he was ‘alienated and overwhelmed’.  Daniell did not make any drawings of coal mines. 

The Royal Academy

The Royal Academy (RA) exercised a strong control that defined acceptable subject matter, and this was rarely breached in the first 25 years of the 19^th Century.  ‘Industrial genre painting’ would not find a place in the RA’s stated list of acceptable subject matter that had ‘High Art – Sacred and Secular’ in first place, and ‘Sea and Landscape Painting’ as the last of the seven acceptable categories. 

Henry Perlee Parker’s ‘Pitmen at play near Newcastle upon Tyne: painted from nature’ was probably the first ‘true’ mining painting to hang in the RA, in 1836.  Parker lived in Newcastle upon Tyne from 1815 to 1840: his works at this time ‘predict the social realist subjects that became firm favourites with the Royal Academy in the late Victorian period’.  His patrons and friends included prominent mining engineers who will have given him access to coal mines. 

J M W Turner’s ‘Keelmen heaving in coals by moonlight’ dates from 1835 ‘but as with all his work it is so much more than just ‘coal’’.  Its roots lie in Turner’s ‘brilliant watercolour study of ‘Shields on the River Tyne’, painted in 1823.

These two works – Parker’s of 1836 and Turner’s of 1835 – both symbolise the dynamism of the change that the coal industry effected at this time: the human element and the organisation and transport of coal that together were providing the momentum for massive social and economic upheaval. 

In the late 18^th Century a number of less-well-known artists also illustrated the growing coal industry.  In the vicinity of Newcastle upon Tyne these included William Beilby, Thomas Bewick and Luke Clennell who took as their subject the relatively advanced collieries of their area.  Other artists at this time also showed human aspects of mining, and marine painters depicted the transport of coal by sea.

1842

Three events in 1842 are significant. 

Firstly, the publication of the First Report of the Commissioners (Mines) from the Children’s Employment Commission included diagrams and illustrations: this caused an outcry, and at the same time paved the way for ‘a new form of artistic realism’. 

Secondly. the founding of the Illustrated London News was the first mass circulation journal that used pictures as a means of communication, and other similar publications soon followed.  The coal mining industry and associated economic and social change were reported and illustrated.

Thirdly, a ‘relatively obscure artist’, Thomas H Hair published his Views of the Collieries in the Counties of Northumberland and Durham.  This was the result of Hair’s travels from about 1837 to 1840, during which he made ‘objective watercolours of the most advanced and profitable pits’.  The published illustrations were ‘etched rather than engraved’.

During the next fifty years there was frequent illustrated reportage of aspects of life in the coal industry in mass circulation publications.  

Dramatic illustration

In 1875 John Ruskin deplored the tendency that had developed by that date for ‘young socially concerned artists’ to depict subjects in the genre of the popular taste for dramatic illustration of contemporary scenes.  But in 1882 Vincent Van Gogh took the opposite view, writing that ‘the English black and white artists’ have the same sentiment as Dickens – ‘noble and healthy’.

‘Genre painting’ was accepted in 19^th Century Britain but most artists who produced such work have now been forgotten.  Genre paintings that are remembered are those ‘whose subject matter is of historical or sociological interest or where the work maintains a very high quality and can be measured in terms of virtuosity’.  A work that is remembered is William Scott Bell’s ‘Coal and Iron’.

After the death of the Prince Consort in 1861 the ‘acceptable tragedy of modern life’ was increasingly depicted in illustrated publications by portraying contemporary situations of suffering such as colliery disasters.  Previously the acceptable manner for artists to engage with human tragedy was through ‘history painting’.  The Hartley Colliery Disaster in 1862 was the subject of a painting in the Royal Academy exhibition of that year: Frederick Bacon Barwell’s ‘Unaccredited Heroes – A Pit Mouth’. 

The ‘sentimentality, mawkishness and complacency of mid-19^th Century art continued unchanged for the larger part of forty years’.  The extremes of sentiment within society were reflected in the wide range of approaches taken by artists to the coal industry.

A preference for photography

In 1893 William Thomas – the Camborne Superintendent of Mines – criticised the ‘mining genre art’ for its lurid approach and he expressed a preference for photography for the portrayal of mining.  Thomas was not a disinterested observer: he was championing his photographer friend John Charles Burrow whose underground photographs of Cornish tin mines are ‘technical masterpieces’.  ‘After Burrow’s documentation ..... a more realistic and informed method of representation had to be adopted’.  By the time of Burrow’s death in 1914 many photographers had achieved a massive archive of documentary record of all aspects of coal mining in Britain. 

‘Modern artists have to search for ..... adaptations of old ideas to the spirit of our time’

Writing in 1903 in the Art Magazine of 1903, P G Konody wrote that ‘modern artists have to search for ..... adaptations of old ideas to the spirit of our time’.  This reflected the writer’s optimism and his understanding of changes taking place in art elsewhere in Europe.  But the First World War ‘made irrelevant the entire scale of sensibilities held previously’. 

The ‘New Realism’ of German artists in the 1920s had no equivalent in Britain. 

P G Konody’s challenge was not taken up until the 1930s.  Various trends developed over this decade and during the Second World War.  Pre-war initiatives were: the documentary film crews of John Grierson; the Mass Observation Unit; the photographers Bill Brandt and Edwin Smith; and the ‘pitmen painters’ of the Ashington Group.  The War Artists Advisory Committee placed artists - Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Stanley Spencer and other artists - ‘in the midst of industry’ during war time.  Sutherland and Moore painted among the coal industry.

The artist Josef Herman arrived in the Swansea valleys, ‘via Warsaw, Brussels and Glasgow’ in 1944.  He stayed for 11 years and produced ‘images of Welsh miners (that) are probably the most well known symbols of British mining’.  The artist who settles in a mining community to paint is an ‘outsider’.  Herman’s paintings show a mining community that has ‘returned to those votive symbols of primitive religions’.  The ‘outsider’ ‘has to become an ‘insider’ even to half understand the nature of coal mining or the special qualities of the miner and his community’.

The photographers Robert Frank and Eugene Smith worked in the Welsh mining communities in the first few years after nationalisation in 1947.  They became ‘insiders’.  For these photographers ‘the individual is of overriding importance’. 

The opposite view was taken by Bernd and Hilla Becher in their photography of the British coalfields in 1973.  These photographs record 19^th and 20^th Century industrial structures in a way that is closely controlled in order to contain the meaning of the image: these are sculptural forms ‘that make no comment or protest concerning the mining industry or its workers’.

Artists have continued to work in the mining industry: ‘individual approaches ...... are manifested most clearly by those artists who have continued to search for the equation that will transcend mere reality’.