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together encapsulate the complexities of the attitude toward industry in
England at that time. While Loutherbourg's painting stands as an em-
blem of the fear and mystery articulated by the Burkian sublime (see
Section 3.3), the later aquatint transforms Coalbrookdale into a relatively
benign picturesque landscape for English tourists. Later in the nineteenth
century artists in various traditions, including the impressionists, some-
times placed industrial sites harmoniously into natural landscapes or
towns.
14
In early twentieth century North America, images of the indus-
trial landscape were usurped by powerful industrialists such as Herbert
Dow (Frese 2000) and Henry Ford (Troyan & Hirshler 1987, pp. 17-21),
who commissioned artists to celebrate their economic prowess and
enhance their public relations. Naturally these paintings provided a posi-
tive, and suitably unthreatening, image of the industries they depicted.
For these, unlike earlier images of industry such as
Coalbrookdale at
Night
, therefore, we can unambiguously read the smoke coming out of
the chimneys as a symbol of economic productivity and wealth rather
than as a noxious indicator of industrial pollution (Figure 14).
A varied representation of industry can also be found in images of
workers in industrial settings (Figure 15). In many paintings of this genre
the workers are rendered as heroic and hard-working and it is the repre-
sentation of their surroundings that expresses the artists' attitude toward
industry itself. A typical early example is Joseph Wright's
An Iron Forge
(Figure 15a). Using his trademark chiaroscuro technique, this middle-
class artist painted the iron workers in a picturesque setting being ob-
served by affluent tourists and their curious children apparently seeking,
in one critic's words, a “thoughtful balance […] between sense and sen-
sibility, between the prosaic, necessary task efficiently performed which
is going to benefit mankind, and the fear or amazement that its accom-
plishment inspires” (Nicoldon 1968, p. 50). It also, however, reveals the
darker side of the picturesque in which the working classes were aes-
theticized for the consumption of the affluent. In nineteenth-century real-
14
For example see Camille Pissarro's
Factory near Pointoise
(1873) (Frese, p. 5) and
Vincent van Gogh's
The Huth Factories at Clichy
(1887) (Hughes 1981, p. 326). On
impressionist industrial landscapes, see Diers & Hedinger 2002; on the German
Biedermeier tradition of frequently commissioned industrial landscape paintings, see
Vorsteher 2002.
