We have become so accustomed to artists work-ing with almost anything, from male urinals to unmade beds (a development wonderfully extended in Tomoko Takahashi's current show at the Serpentine Gallery in London), that it comes as a surprise to recall that very few of them, during the first hundred years of the industrial revolution, thought of drawing the machines that enabled Britain to lead the world. Not many paid attention to the workers, either. While novelists were happy to describe the social and physical conditions created by the "dark Satanic mills", the artists who might have painted these scenes were conspicuously absent.
The Germans, and even the Spanish, drew pictures of industrial activity in the 19th century, but the British rarely bothered. Obsessed by the natural world, most artists were stuck observ-ing life in the countryside and the country house. Search the relevant catalogues of Tate Britain and you will find little besides portraits, landscapes, ships and the sea. Even when J M W Turner brought himself to paint a train, he portrayed it as a dramatic element in a rural setting, rather than as a significant object in itself. His drawings of the nascent industries of Leeds and Sheffield, usually to be discerned on the distant skyline, reveal nothing of the conditions within.
We can guess at the reasons for this reticence: the conservative nature of Victorian society and the lack of patrons, as well as the relentless hostility to industrialism and "the slavery of industrial labour" voiced by influential critics such as John Ruskin. Yet a handful of largely unremembered British artists made an effort to swim against the mainstream and put the workshops of Britain into their sketchbooks - notably Thomas Hornor, Thomas Allom, William Bell Scott and James Sharples.
Tim Barringer has put some of these forgotten artists under the spotlight and entwined their stories with the contemporary theories of Ruskin and Pugin. Men at Work seeks to emulate the pioneering and irreplaceable work of Francis Klingender, whose Art and the Industrial Revolution, an avowedly Marxist interpretation, was first published in 1947 and remains the only com- prehensive survey of the subject. (Klingender's book began as the catalogue of an exhibition celebrating the silver jubilee of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, later the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, now sadly known only as Amicus.)
Not so ambitious in timescale as Klingender, and somewhat infected with art-historical and post-colonial jargon, Barringer is concerned less with class than with gender, religion and empire, perceived to be the subjects of overriding interest to readers in the 21st century. He concentrates on art production during the mid-Victorian period from 1851 to 1886 - the first year marking the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, London, and the second the Colonial and Indian Exhibition at South Kensington. He revives the people and debates of this pivotal era, and concludes, almost by accident, with a fascinating coda about art and empire. This is a well-argued, beautifully illustrated and absorbing study of a time when art and industry were at loggerheads.
Barringer starts with the Great Exhibition, designed to show off Britain's industrial supremacy amid objects of varying kinds from all over the world. Prince Albert commissioned a number of artists to record this huge event, and some of their paintings (later popularised in coloured prints) were of the machinery on show. Others were of Pugin's extraordinary evocation of medieval England, and still more were of the splendid arts of the ever-expanding Indian empire. These were a revelation to British visitors, some of whom recognised the superiority of Indian design.
Yet while "machine operatives, rural handcraftsmen, artisans in workshops, industrial engineers, designers and artists" were all represented by their work at the exhibition, manual labourers were not. The omission reflected the utopian attitude to machinery and labour of the exhibition's organisers, with their implicit hope that the machine might soon replace the labouring masses, who were even at that moment beginning to organise themselves as a class - or at least as a group capable of making demands and frightening the bourgeoisie through riot and demonstration.
This was not Ruskin's argument, and throughout the period covered by Barringer's book he championed the individual genius of the workman against the dehumanising effects of the machine. The working man began to appear in the paintings of Ford Madox Brown as a semi-religious figure, reflecting the high point of Christian socialism, and in those of George Vicat Cole as sentimental and (as Barringer shows) highly improbable labourers in the cornfields of Sussex. Cole's paintings found a market among the urban day-trippers on the new railway lines, who liked what they saw from the carriage window. Barringer deconstructs one of his harvest scenes and concludes that the five labourers on display would have been incapable of harvesting the large wheat field in which they occupy a tiny corner.
The introduction into painting of industrial or mechanical activity, often in chiaroscuro style, can be traced back to the 1760s and the works of Joseph Wright of Derby, who had a handful of followers in the 19th century. One of them was James Sharples, a blacksmith by trade who appeared in Samuel Smiles's Self-Help (1859) as an emblematic autodidact who had taught himself to draw and paint. His evocative painting The Forge (produced between 1844 and 1847) is reminiscent of Wright's work, and was so successful in printed reproduction that the Bank of England bought 12 copies and the Foreign Office 30. Are they perhaps still to be found in some dusty institutional corridor?
Ruskin's hostility to the machine and the market, and the spiritual impoverishment of the industrial labourer, grew ever more entrenched over the years. He yearned for what he saw as the purity of the pre-capitalist era. Rejected in Britain, his message found its mark in the British empire, specifically India, where his views struck surprising root in the art school of Lahore. Barringer's coda, entitled "Colonial Gothic", points out unkindly that while the Foreign Office was proudly displaying prints of Britain's industrial modernity, the India Office (or its earlier embodiment) was advocating the Puginesque ideals of medieval ornamentation and craftsmanship. The neo-Gothic style soon became even more flamboyant in the railway stations of India than in the museums and colleges of Oxford.
Belatedly, given that Indian arts and crafts had been debilitated if not destroyed by the impact of empire, colonial cultural bureaucrats such as John Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard's father, began to eulogise India's village potters and weavers in the language of Ruskin and William Morris, albeit preferring the upmarket operatives with princely patronage to the local craftsmen who were rapidly disappearing into history. When Indian carpet-weavers were put on show at the Colonial Exhibition in 1886, they came from the jail at Agra, graduates of its handicrafts course for prisoners. Less than ten years later, in 1894, Mohandas Gandhi (as he was then called), a young Indian lawyer in South Africa, began to drink from the same well. After reading Ruskin, he launched a movement to abandon industrial modernity and return India to the world of the spinning wheel - a homespun philosophy powerful enough to destroy the empire. Anti- globalisation campaigners might take note.
Richard Gott is working on a history of imperial rebellions
