George Stubbs's painting The Reapers (1783) presents an idealised vision of the eighteenth-century British countryside. It is harvest time and a farmer on horseback supervises the work of well-dressed, industrious labourers. A distant row of elm trees marks the edge of the field, signalling that this is a cultivated landscape which has been divided into orderly rectangular plots. The image evokes a sense of harmonious, timeless intimacy between rural labourers and the natural world.
It is easy for a modern-day viewer to take this kind of painting at face value and see it as a nostalgic record of how the British countryside used to be. Yet someone looking at Stubbs's painting in the late eighteenth century might have had a surprisingly different understanding of it. The countryside was being dramatically transformed by large-scale human interventions whose legacy remains with us today. Through British landscape paintings, we can trace the rise of modern ideas about industry, extraction, energy and pollution.
In Thomas Gainsborough's earlier Mr and Mrs Andrews (c.1750), a similar landscape is shown from the vantage point of the elite landowners. The painting is a double portrait of a newly married couple and their estate. The land shown on the right has been recently and drastically transformed. Over the course of the eighteenth century, a significant portion of the English countryside was consolidated into privately owned plots, subdivided into separate areas with distinct uses. Enclosure replaced an agricultural system that had endured since the Middle Ages and it deprived enormous segments of the rural population from traditional access to communal resources.
Evidence of enclosure can be seen in Gainsborough's painting in the orderly rows of trees on the right and the newly constructed wooden fence in the distance, within which livestock graze. Mr and Mrs Andrews would have taken pride in this 'modernised' landscape, which could be made more productive and efficient under new Enlightenment farming practices, including advanced crop rotation and the introduction of iron ploughs.
Gainsborough's painting celebrates the changes being made to the countryside, including modernising systems of land use. It also signals an important shift in how the natural world was being understood – the landscape was being treated as a resource or a collection of resources that should be rationalised, optimised and monetised. In many ways, this is still how we think of the natural world today.
There were related efforts in Scotland to use modern technology to make land use more efficient. Paul Sandby's Fulling Mill, Fife (c.1750) was made around the same time as Mr and Mrs Andrews. Both paintings celebrate change and modernisation.
Sandby's watercolour serves as an important contrast to Stubbs's later painting because it reveals the extent to which mechanisation was being introduced into rural ways of life, decades before Stubbs produced his nostalgic vision of pre-mechanised rural labour.
In George Morland's The Old Water Mill (1790), a water-powered mill is shown harmoniously integrated with other aspects of rural life. Thousands of mills could be found in the British countryside, where they had been used for centuries to mill corn and grind flour. The thatched roof of the mill resembles the mottled brown hues seen on the ground, implying that the mill is a natural part of the landscape.
Morland's painting, like that of Stubbs, envisions a countryside that is unchanging and abundant. Sheep rest on the left, a horse grazes on the right and a family crosses the stream in the foreground. Upon closer inspection, Moreland's painting might register the modernisation of the landscape as well. It is unclear what the young family in the foreground are doing. Their donkey is laden with several heavy baskets. Are they returning from a visit to the stream, where they have gone to wash their linens and bathe? Or could they be among the thousands of rural labourers who were dispossessed of their land as a result of enclosure, travelling in search of a new life?
At the time of Morland's painting in the late eighteenth century, Britain's mills were powered by what we today call renewable resources: water, air and animal power. One of the first factories in England, Sir Richard Arkwright's cotton mill, was the subject of multiple paintings by Joseph Wright of Derby. Wright portrays the arrival of large-scale mechanisation and industrialisation in the countryside.
In 1769 Arkwright patented his design for a cotton-spinning machine (called a water frame) that was powered by a water wheel, replacing traditional hand spinning. Mechanised manufacturing operated by unskilled workers could produce cotton yarn quicker and at greater volumes. The factory system was born.
Hundreds of new mills in Arkwright's style had been built across England by the time Morland painted The Old Water Mill. In Wright's painting, the factory, with its gleaming white exterior and neat rows of identical windows, appears orderly and rational. Yet it is nestled happily within a wooded valley. A horse-drawn cart in the centre reassures the viewer that traditional ways of life can coincide with new forms of manufacturing.
Arkwright selected the location for his new factory in part because it was downstream of a lead mine, which guaranteed the mill a regular supply of warm water. Like mills, mines had been present in the British countryside for centuries. In Philip de Loutherbourg's aquatint print of A View of the Black-lead Mine in Cumberland (1787), mining broadly resembles other kinds of pre-industrial rural labour: baskets overflow with ore, a thatched structure blends with the natural environment, workers rest and converse, and the central wagon is drawn by a luminous white horse.
Fulling Mill, Fife
c.1750, pen & watercolour on paper by Paul Sandby (1731–1809) 
In reality, the large-scale extraction of mineral resources was making irreversible changes to the British countryside. The Copper Mines on the Parys Mountain (1785) by John 'Warwick' Smith shows figures raising and lowering buckets at an open seam of what was then the largest copper mine in the world. The economic prosperity of this entire Welsh region was derived at least in part from the extraction and smelting of ore.
Copper Mines on the Parys Mountain
1785
John 'Warwick' Smith (1749–1831) 
The natural beauty of the Welsh landscape had been captured vividly by the pioneering landscape painter Richard Wilson, who was born in northern Wales and later trained in Italy. His vivid portrayal of Llyn-y-Cau, Cader Idris places the viewer near the summit of Cader Idris, highlighting the Welsh mountain's steep, craggy peaks. This is a setting untouched by human society and the demands of modern industry.
In another of Smith's watercolours showing the Junction of Mona and Parys Mountain Copper Mines (1790), one can see Wilson's imagery of the Welsh countryside repeated and inverted. The cavernous pits excavated from the mountain have created a set of earthen formations whose jagged, triangular peaks and contrasting depths resemble the mountains for which Wilson had made Wales famous. From this vantage point, an eighteenth-century viewer might be reassured that the natural character of a region's topography could be preserved even in the most active mines.
Junction of Mona and Parys Mountain Copper Mines
1790
John 'Warwick' Smith (1749–1831) 
The smoke trailing up from distant furnaces in Smith's watercolour is one of the few indications that mining – and especially the smelting of metal ores – released toxic chemicals including arsenic into the air and water of the Welsh countryside. Such furnaces required large supplies of coal or coke as fuel to separate the metal from the ore. Whereas the furnaces in Wilson's watercolours appear distant and unimposing, Loutherbourg summoned a more infernal vision of smelting.
In Coalbrookdale at Night (1801), coke hearths above blast furnaces release giant plumes of yellow and orange smoke into the sky. The ironworks have cast the rest of the landscape in shadow, with a portion of the moon visible on the right. In the foreground, a horse-drawn wagon travels along metal rails that had been installed in 1767 to facilitate the transport of materials across the site. These rails would later give way to a locomotive, heralding the rise of the railways.
It was J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) – an admirer of Loutherbourg – who would later offer the most intensive set of artistic meditations on the relationship between the British landscape and industrial modernity. His The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her Last Berth to be broken up, 1838 (1840) is primarily known as an elegy for a former era of British naval heroism and the age of sail that powered it.
The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her Last Berth to be broken up, 1838
1839
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) 
Turner's work also marked the rise of industry and coal mining in northern England. It is likely that both the tugboat and the coal burned inside its engine came from Newcastle, a growing centre of industrial extraction and manufacturing.
A study for Turner's painting gestures towards the deeper transformations that coal-powered modernity was bringing to the British landscape. In Steamer and Lightship; a study for 'The Fighting Temeraire' (c.1838–1839), you can barely make out the scene through the dense, dust-coloured air that would have been familiar to Turner's contemporaries.
Steamer and Lightship; a study for 'The Fighting Temeraire'
c.1838–9
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) 
Thick atmospheric pollution from mills and gas-powered lighting were a routine part of life in Britain's capital in the early nineteenth century. Even at this early moment, Turner appears to have recognised that the very way we view the natural world would be mediated by the steam of modernity.
Stephanie O'Rourke, Senior Lecturer in Art History, University of St Andrews, Scotland
This content was funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation
