The early industrial revolution in Europe used existing forms of power, wind and water, but quickly outgrew their capacity and turned to coal to fuel its growth. The heat generated by burning coal turned water into steam, and steam powered engines to run industrial processes and to move goods, including coal from the mines.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, coal mining grew greatly in the coalfields that had been discovered across northern Europe. Although some was quarried from open-cast sites, most production came from deep mines. Northern France, Belgium, Germany, Poland, and Britain had an insatiable need for hard-working, fit young men to work as miners in the towns and cities that developed in mining areas. In Britain alone, annual production of coal grew from 3 to 16 million tons between 1700 and 1815, and doubled again by the middle of the nineteenth century.

Constantin Meunier is best known for his gritty paintings of coal mining and foundries in Belgium in the late nineteenth century. He started painting these motifs in 1880, when he was commissioned to paint industrial parts of the country, and continued until his death in 1905. Unfortunately almost all of these paintings are undated.

The similarities between Meunier’s Mining Area (above) and Black Country – Borinage (below) suggest that they are the same view, and that above may have been his original plein air sketch. The Borinage was one of the major coal mining areas in Europe at the time, and is in the Belgian province of Hainault. It was here that Vincent van Gogh lived between 1878-80. The tower at the left is the pit head, where trucks of freshly cut coal were brought to the surface.

Meunier’s painting of Miner at the Exit of the Shaft shows several miners enjoying a few moments to smoke and relax at the pit head. Three are carrying safety lamps, used to minimise the risk of underground explosions even though they had flames inside them. These were developed in about 1815, after a long succession of mine disasters caused by explosions, and weren’t replaced by electric lamps until after 1900.

In his Return from the Mine, two male miners stride back to their cottages after completing their shift underground. With them is a young woman, employed to perform supporting tasks, who is walking barefoot and holding up her wooden clogs.

Painted in 1887, The Carriage Driver shows another working woman, taking a short break from her duties. She appears to be sat by the pit head, and has a safety lamp by her left leg, making it likely that she too is in one of the mining areas.

One task largely performed by women was the movement of wagons containing coal or spoil (general rock debris). These two young women, termed Les Hiercheuses, did just that, and were painted by Meunier in about 1885-90.

Meunier also made monumental reliefs and sculptures to commemorate the miners, and this Triptych of the Mine, showing their Descent, Calvary, and Ascent, to parallel the Crucifixion.

Until its mechanisation in the twentieth century, coal mining was almost entirely manual. It also had one of the highest risks of death or injury at work. Those who survived the immediate physical dangers rarely lived long, as a result of destructive lung disease (pneumoconiosis) from inhaling dust when working underground.

As urban areas grew and were remodelled during the nineteenth century, demand for construction workers increased. Many of those who were drawn from the country found employment as labourers, and some were able to undertake more skilled jobs as carpenters. Several painters of the period showed insights into the working conditions in this industry, including George Hendrik Breitner who painted views of Amsterdam during its expansion late that century.

Breitner captured this in his undated watercolour sketch of Ground Porters with Carts. These were the jobs that immigrants from the country were often employed in, as physically demanding and dirty as their previous work on the land.

Building Site in Amsterdam is another of Breitner’s sketches of construction work, this time painted in oils.

In Paris, it was Maximilien Luce who painted some of the best insights into the rebuilding of parts of the city in the early years of the twentieth century.

The Pile Drivers (1902-3) is one of Maximilien Luce’s explorations of the working life of the common man in Paris. These labourers are pulling on the rope to drive piles into the foundation of buildings on the banks of the River Seine. Although piles could also be driven by steam power, it was often cheaper and quicker to use labourers instead.

Luce’s Construction Site from 1911 shows the intense human involvement in the urban cycle of demolition and rebuilding.

This period also brought some vast works of civil engineering, such as the construction of the ship canal between Liverpool and Manchester in England.

The Excavation of the Manchester Ship Canal: Eastham Cutting with Mount Manisty in the distance (1891) is one of a series Benjamin Williams Leader painted showing the fruits of his brother’s engineering labours. This major canal was constructed between 1887 and 1893, and carries ocean-going ships from the estuary of the River Mersey near Liverpool 36 miles (58 km) into the heart of Manchester, in the industrial north of England. This view is set close to the seaward entrance, and shows steam diggers and railways being used to excavate and remove the spoil, some of which is building Mount Manisty to the left of centre. The canal remains in use, and is currently being further improved.

Many of those working in these industries increasingly felt exploited in the late nineteenth century, leading to social unrest and strikes, as I’ll show in the next article in this series.

Across much of the temperate parts of the northern hemisphere, this is the wettest part of the year. It’s when puddles are everywhere, and what used to be firm ground turns into soft deep mud. Footpaths and bridleways become deep tracts of mud, impassable in anything but high boots. Yet look through paintings of winter and you’ll notice that few artists before 1800 have depicted people, vehicles or animals in mud of any significant depth. This weekend I look at some of the more faithful accounts of this ingloriously muddy time of year.

In the early nineteenth century, streets in major cities in Europe including Paris spent much of the winter as muddy morasses. Enterprising poorer inhabitants took long planks to locations where the more affluent would try to cross those rivers of mud, and hired them out to enable the rich to stay cleaner.

This is shown well in Louis-Léopold Boilly’s Passer Payez, or Pay to Pass, from about 1803, where a whole family is taking advantage of one of these crossings. This spared their footwear and clothing the otherwise inevitable coating of mud. As you can see, their shoes, lower legs and clothing are amazingly clean, as if they might actually have been painted in Boilly’s studio rather than the muddy streets of Paris.

As realism and real-world scenes became more popular in the middle of the nineteenth century, Adolph von Menzel showed a more accurate view of the problem of muddy roads in his Hussars Rescue a Polish Family from 1850. It had clearly been a wet autumn, with the leaves still burning red and gold on the trees in the background. These mounted soldiers are helping the elderly women from their carriage across the muddy ruts of the road. The hussar in the foreground, with his back to the viewer, even has mud on his riding boots.

One of the first artists to have used mud in a more meaningful way is Jean-Léon Gérôme, in his 1868 painting of The Death of Marshal Ney. Michel Ney (1769-1815) was a leading military commander during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and was made a Marshal of France by Napoleon. Following Napoleon’s defeat and exile in the summer of 1815, Ney was arrested, and tried for treason by the Chamber of Peers. He was found guilty, and executed by firing squad near the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris on 7 December 1815.

Gérôme shows Ney’s body abandoned after the execution, slumped face down and lifeless in the mud, his top hat resting apart at the right edge of the canvas. The firing squad is being marched off, to the left and into the distance. The mud only reinforces Gérôme’s powerful image of a cold, bleak, heartless execution.

Mud also has its recreational uses, as children of all eras will attest. Ludwig Knaus’s painting of Mud Pies from 1873 shows a group of children in the evening, near Dusseldorf, Germany, who are enjoying play in and with the mud, which is less fun for the swineherd behind them.

While other Impressionists had been exploring the effects of transient light on the River Thames, in 1875, Giuseppe De Nittis examined the city’s muddy and rutted streets, in his painting of The Victoria Embankment, London. This wasn’t one of the older roads in the city either: the Victoria Embankment wasn’t constructed until 1865, and had only opened to traffic five years before De Nittis painted it.

Muddy roads in northern British cities like Leeds were one of the favourite settings for the nocturnes of John Atkinson Grimshaw. At The Park Gate from 1878 (above) and November from 1879 (below) are glistening examples.

There’s an old English proverb “February fill dyke, be it black or be it white”, referring to the rain (black) or snow (white) that usually falls heavily during the month and fills all the ditches. Benjamin Williams Leader borrows that in his February Fill Dyke showing the waterlogged countryside near Worcester in 1881.

Mud became a favourite effect in the Naturalist paintings made so popular in France by Jules Bastien-Lepage.

Pas Mèche (Nothing Doing) (1882) shows a cheeky ploughboy equipped with his whip and horn, on his way out to work in the fields. His face is grubby, his clothing frayed, patched, and dirty, and his boots caked in mud.

But for real mud, deep enough for wheels and legs to sink in and cake clothing, I turn to central and eastern Europe.

Jakub Schikaneder’s The Sad Way from 1886 shows a single weary horse towing a cart on which a coffin rests. The woman, presumably widowed before her time, stares emptily at the rutted mud track, as a man walks beside them. It’s late autumn in a world that is barren, bleak, muddy and forlorn.

Józef Marian Chełmoński’s undated Market is one of the most vivid insights into country life in Poland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To reach this street market, carts are being drawn through a deep ditch full of muddy water. Market stalls are mounted on tables set in the mud, which forms the basis for everything.

Also undated is contemporary and fellow Polish artist Alfred Wierusz-Kowalski’s Meeting the Train. A couple of horse-drawn carts have gone to a rural railway station to meet a train. The winter snow still covers much of the ground, except where it has been turned into rutted mud on the road.