Watercolour painting as an artform became widely used at the turn of the 19th century and was thought particularly suitable for recording landscapes. This period saw many artists use watercolour to celebrate the beauty of the English countryside – green fields, picturesque woods, ancient monuments – in works like this one by John Constable.
The early 19th century was also the time of the industrial revolution that was starting to change the landscape. Among the V&A’s vast collection of watercolours, there are many that depict the new vistas of industrial landscape – factories, quarries, canals. Perhaps because I am from industrial Birmingham, I am particularly drawn to these watercolours and can see in them scenes as captivating and full of their own beauty and drama as Constable’s depiction of Stonehenge.
This view of a landscape with factories reflects the topographical origins of watercolour painting. In the 18th century artists would be employed to create a likeness of a scene and would add tone with simple sepia or a light colour wash. As England turned from an agrarian to an industrial economy, the landscape, particularly in the north of England, was increasingly populated with factories, like the one depicted here. Advances in engineering and the use of steam power meant that activities such as textile manufacture moved from small scale, handmade crafts into large scale mechanised industry.
Factories demanded large amounts of fuel and raw materials. The countryside was now an important source of coal, metals and building materials, and the mining industries expanded to meet these needs. This dramatic watercolour shows the Parys mine in Anglesey – the largest open-cast copper mine in the world in the early 19th century. The wild mountains of the Welsh landscape drew many artists seeking to represent ‘the sublime’ in their works by depicting intense scenes, such as momentous mountains or raging torrents, that could almost overwhelm the viewer with beauty or power. It seems this man-made quarry was just as enticing to artists as Day was not the only one to visit the sight – Ibbetson and Warwick Smith visited several times in the 1790s. The viewpoint from the bottom of the quarry shows its vast scale, and the impressive extent of the excavations, and gave it a dramatic quality equal to natural cliffs and caverns.
In Cornwall, tin and copper were mined extensively in the early 19th century until cheaper materials from abroad – from the then vast British Empire – meant the industry went into decline. This melancholy watercolour of a deserted tin mine by Sickert gives the ruined mine the same grandeur as the decayed churches beloved by artists looking for romantic and picturesque views in historic sites such as Tintern Abbey.
The industrial revolution needed raw materials for building infrastructure as well as fuelling factories. Railways, canals, warehouses sprung up to support the transport of good. This watercolour shows the area around Kings Cross being developed. It was drawn on the spot in 1832, 20 years before the station opened. Shepherd was a specialist in urban topography, used to drawing buildings rather than hills and trees. He captures all the details of the growing city: the foreground shows the large kilns for making bricks; in the background there are smoking chimneys and buildings as far as you can see. The very rapid change of this time is remarkable as Kings Cross was open fields in the 1740s.
This atmospheric watercolour shows part of the canal network that transported raw materials and finished goods around the country and transformed Birmingham into an industrial hub. I wouldn’t be a proper Brummie if I didn’t mention here that Birmingham has more miles of canals than Venice. Painted in 1919 (so around the time of the Peaky Blinders), this murky watercolour has the gloom of the established industrial city – there is no green pigment used at all; the sky is painted in greys with chimney smoke merging with the cloudy sky.
The English Midlands was called the Black Country due to all the smoke, soot and pollution from the huge number of factories operating in the area. Coal, iron ore and limestone were mined locally in the Willingsworth area and taken to the ironworks for smelting before heading away on the canals. The colouring of this watercolour again in very muted – browns, black and grey to depict how all pervading the grime of industry was in the district. However, the football pitch in the foreground is a humanising touch and shows that the local people – many of whom, old and young, male and female, would be employed in the ironworks making iron or iron products from tools to nails – also had their own lives and interests alongside the dominating factory.
This watercolour from 1945 shows the beginning of the decline of England’s industrial economy that characterised the mid and late 20th century. The broken and twisted metal infrastructure is now collapsed against the abandoned slagheap. The return of colour shows the landscape is no longer an active, polluting industrial site.
This watercolour of ‘Sunset and Industry’ from the mid 20th century gives a softer, almost romantic view of industry. The factory is a hazy image, and while the polluting stacks are still belching out smoke, they do not drown out the sunset. The artist was the son of a colliery manager so perhaps this gave his view a slightly nostalgic overview. The sunset could be seen to be a metaphor for the decline of industry.
While many will be glad to see the back of heavy industry, with its black clouds of polluting smoke and its ravaging of the countryside for raw materials, it remains an important part of the history of the UK. These watercolours give us an artistic but also emotional view of the history of industrial landscape.
