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.

If country folk were to be drawn into towns and cities, those urban areas had to provide paid work. During the early decades of the industrial revolution those jobs were often in mills and factories near the source of their raw materials or power. Towns grew rapidly across the coalfields of northern Europe as mines were sunk to extract the coal, and again where iron ore was readily available. As canals and railways enabled supplies to be moved further and faster, towns and cities flourished as centres of manufacturing.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, large scale iron production had already started in North America. In 1857, investors opened a site for the production of iron primarily for the growing railways across Canada, and a few years later William Armstrong painted those Toronto Rolling Mills (1864). By this time, it was the largest iron mill in Canada, and the largest manufacturing industry in the city, but it was soon surpassed by steel mills and shut down in 1873.

John Ferguson Weir took his dark realism before an unusual motif for American painting at that time, the hot, harsh, and dangerous world of the West Point Iron and Cannon Factory, in The Gun Foundry (1866). The moment shown here is the casting of a Parrott Gun, in the foundry responsible for making most of the large guns used by the Union forces during the Civil War. This was located to the north of New York City, where there was a rich supply of timber, local iron ore, and water power.

Weir’s Forging the Shaft is a replica painted in 1874-7, after the original of 1868 was destroyed by fire. It shows the same foundry, this time working the massive propellor shaft for an ocean liner, more a symbol of peace and trade than past conflict.

Adolph von Menzel’s The Iron Rolling Mill from 1875 gives a good impression of the crowded, sweaty, and dangerous environment in which iron and steel workers spent, and sometimes lost, their lives.

Production of steel on an industrial scale started after 1857, with the introduction of the Bessemer Process. Constantin Meunier’s undated Steel Foundry must therefore have been painted during the 1860s or later.

The dangers of iron and steel work are obvious today, and claimed many casualties at the time. Few employers had any concern for the safety of those who worked in these conditions, as there was a steady supply of young and able men to keep production rolling and profits accruing.

Not all industries were heavy, hot or sweaty. Charles Frederic Ulrich painted a young apprentice drinking during a moment’s pause in his work in The Village Printing Shop, Haarlem (1884).

Christian Ludwig Bokelmann’s oil sketch of a Lead Mine in Selbeck (1888) has a more subtle social message for an ancient industry that had long recognised the toxicity of the lead it worked with, but continued to employ children.

The Naturalist artist Jean-Eugène Buland tackled more complex issues in his Un Patron, or The Apprentice’s Lesson (1888). After France’s ignominious defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, efforts were made to make France more industrial and more modern. Here a young boy is being trained by the foreman to make a cogwheel, when many would have preferred him still to be at school.

Painting men and women at work was by no means confined to Naturalists, with their attention to fine detail. Alessandro Milesi’s undated The Spinners is a much looser oil sketch that could qualify as being an Impression. This shows one of the lighter industries that employed predominantly women.

Maximilien Luce painted many works showing people at work, as his style moved on from Neo-Impressionism to Post-Impressionism during the 1890s. His Charleroi Foundry, Casting (1896) shows this well, and is one of a long series he painted showing those working in heavy industry in this city in the mining area of Belgium.

With the decline of Naturalism in the early twentieth century, the emphasis on workers weakened, and artists like Hans Baluschek returned to painting heavy plant and processes in his Steel Rolling Mill (1910).

Finally, Robert Sterl’s Ironworkers of 1919 is an oil sketch showing workers at one of the Krupp plants in Germany. Their only protective clothing is a heavy leather apron.

For those used to agricultural work, factories were relentlessly demanding. Workloads didn’t change with season, and each year passed without the celebration of harvest home. Few employers had easier work available that might offer those recovering from illness or injury a little respite, and as age took its toll on their bodies the only alternative was unemployment.

For those who had arrived from the country, towns and cities were alien places. This article shows a selection of paintings of the ordinary parts where the common people lived and worked.

The city of Paris was substantially redeveloped by Georges-Eugène Haussmann during the middle of the nineteenth century, but his wide boulevards only displaced common people into cramped slums in other areas. Montmartre, for instance, wasn’t incorporated into the city until 1860, and in 1871 was the source of the uprising that became the Paris Commune.

Pierre Bonnard’s Rue Tholozé or Montmartre in the Rain (1897) shows one of the streets at the heart of Montmartre, not far from the famous Sacré-Coeur. Seen from the third or fourth floor, it’s a grey and wet evening in which the lights of the windows provide a pervasive warm glow.

Bonnard’s Narrow Street in Paris (c 1897) is an aerial view of a bustling backstreet.

George Bellows’ famous Cliff Dwellers (1913) shows the largely immigrant population of tenements in Lower East Side of New York City. Washing was hung out to dry on ropes strung between their wooden balconies.

Colin Campbell Cooper’s Columbus Circle from 1909 shows the interaction of jumbled buildings, light, smoke, and steam. With Gaetano Russo’s landmark statue of Christopher Columbus just to the right of centre, the circle had only been completed in 1905, as part of Frederick Law Olmsted’s vision for Central Park, off to the right. In the foreground, Cooper shows some of the more intimate sights of this new elevated world, with a woman hanging out her washing amid the chimneys.

Many cities grew around heavy industries, such as Charleroi in the Black Country of Belgium.

Maximilien Luce’s Slag-Heaps of Sacré Madame from 1897 is perhaps a unique view of this city. Slag heaps or spoil tips were an inevitable sight in coal-mining country. They’re formed from the spoil or waste removed from underground, and don’t contain slag, the by-products of metal smelting. Mining spoil is frequently toxic, and can result in disastrous landslides.

Few cities enjoyed the cleaner air that most do today. In London, in particular, ‘smogs’ composed of a toxic mixture of smoke and fog caused the deaths of many thousands each winter. It wasn’t until well into the twentieth century that any effort was made to reduce smoke emissions from industry and domestic heating.

Frits Thaulow’s The Smoke from 1898 shows a suburb overwhelmed by smoke, with houses crammed up against factory walls. Few cities enforced any separation between industrial areas and housing, and there were no restrictions on the discharge of smoke even in densely populated zones.

Alfred Roll’s undated sketch of A Large Town of Smoke probably dates from the same period.

Whereas the French Impressionists gave small glimpses of smoke billowing from the chimneys of factories sprawling out around Paris, Maximilien Luce painted Industrial City in 1899, again probably around Charleroi.

The largest employer in the German city of Dortmund was its steelworks, founded in 1871. In 1905, Eugen Bracht painted this Impressionist view of the Hoesch Steelworks from the North, with its tall chimneys and their plumes of acrid smoke.

Two years later, Bracht returned to paint the Hoesch Iron and Steel Plant, Dortmund (1907).

Constantin Meunier painted in the Borinage, another mining area to the west of Charleroi in Belgium. His undated Black Country – Borinage shows the area where Vincent van Gogh lived between 1878-80, then one of the major coal mining areas in Europe. The tower at the left is the pit head, where trucks of freshly cut coal were brought to the surface.

Meunier’s Coron, Women having a Chat gives insight into the close communities in these areas, and shows the main drain running down the middle of the street. Coron refers to the local housing of the working class in northern France and Belgium, the equivalent of Britain’s back-to-back miners’ cottages.

The Pile Drivers (1902-3) is one of Luce’s explorations of the working life of the common man in Paris. Construction work in the French capital continued to be active well into the early twentieth century, and Luce painted its many facets. The factories on the opposite bank have infiltrated surrounding residential and commercial districts, only to fill the air with plumes of smoke.