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Coalbrookdale by Night
From: Science Museum
| By:
Neil Cossons |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Coalbrookdale, a English town situated in the valley of the River Severn, was one of the key centres of industrial activity at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Notable British engineers and visitors from all over the world flocked to Coalbrookdale to witness the production of iron on a previously unimaginable scale. One such visitor was the artist Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg who in 1801 painted Coalbrookdale by Night, an extraordinary work that is regarded as a seminal depiction of the first industrial nation. Neil Cossons, former director of the Science Museum, explains the significance of both the town and its eponymous masterpiece. |
...if an atheist who never heard of Coalbrookdale, could be transported there in a dream, and left to awake at the mouth of one of those furnaces, surrounded on all sides by such a number of infernal objects, though he had been all his life the most profligate unbeliever that ever added blasphemy to incredulity, he would infallibly tremble at the last judgement that in imagination would appear to him. |
 ith these apocalyptic words Charles Dibdin, dramatist and song-writer, concluded his observations on the Severn Gorge in Shropshire. What drew Dibdin and numerous other travellers here in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was the remarkable concentration of industrial activity, concerned in the main with ironmaking, spread along some three miles of the valley of the River Severn between Coalbrookdale and Coalport. |
The pioneering work of the Quaker ironmaster Abraham Darby in developing coke smelting in 1709 had been followed by a sequence of new uses for iron--the first iron rails, the first iron bridge, iron boat and steam railway locomotive--making Coalbrookdale an area of interest irresistible to anyone concerned to understand the new forces of industry that were sweeping Britain. Thomas Telford, William Jessop, Josiah Wedgwood, Richard Trevithick, James Watt, Matthew Boulton and John Loudon McAdam were the most notable of the British engineers and entrepreneurs who came to Coalbrookdale. They were joined by visitors from France, Prussia, Bavaria, Sweden and North America, many of whom were to leave accounts of what they saw. At a time when almost all tourists kept a journal of their travels, and many published them, these reflections provide a vivid and often technically detailed record of an area that the Shrewsbury cotton master, Charles Hulbert, was to describe in 1837 as '... the most extraordinary district in the world'. |
The gorge exercised a peculiar fascination for artists too. Here the combination of topography--the River Severn flowing through its precipitous gorge--and the smoke and flames of the furnaces and forges conspired to produce a scene at once picturesque and sublime. Thomas Rowlandson, Paul Sandby Munn, John Sell Cotman, Joseph Farington and J M W Turner are perhaps the best known of the numerous artists who visited the area during this period. But one work above all others epitomizes the artist's vision of the new industrial Britain. It has become the archetypal descriptive of the first industrial nation. |
Coalbrookdale by Night, painted in 1801, is the work of Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740-1812). Born in Strasbourg, the son of a painter of miniatures who moved to Paris when he was still a boy, he settled in England in 1771 and was to have a profound influence on the new generation of artists at the end of the eighteenth century. His early reputation as a designer and painter of stage sets at the Drury Lane Theatre was further enhanced in 1781 when he opened the Eidophusikon in Lisle Street, Leicester Square, a precursor of the popular Panorama and a very real ancestor of the modern cinema. Dramatic effects were produced by manipulating coloured glass in front of the oil lamps that illuminated the scenery while clouds painted on translucent linen moved diagonally past. |
The powerful visual drama of the new industries had a special fascination for de Loutherbourg. He was drawn inevitably to Coalbrookdale. In Coalbrookdale by Night the buildings of an ironworks are silhouetted against the glare from the pig bed as the furnace is tapped. In the foreground horses pull a wagon on a plateway amongst great castings. The precise setting for the picture was for long uncertain but comparisons with contemporary views, notably a watercolour of 1803 by Paul Sandby Munn, demonstrate beyond all doubt that the scene is of the Bedlam Furnaces. Although Bedlam Furnaces are downstream of the Iron Bridge, at the time of de Loutherbourg's visit the whole area of what is now called the Ironbridge Gorge was still known generically as Coalbrookdale. Today the name is restricted to the small side valley of the Severn where Darby established his ironmaking enterprise and where the Coalbrookdale Company still makes iron castings. |
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