by John Harvey
76 John Martin, ‘The Bridge over Chaos’, proof of an illustration for Paradise Lost, 1827, mezzotint.
So for the intaglio print. And in 1796 the Bavarian author Alois Senefelder invented lithography. Here the artist-printmaker draws with a greasy crayon or ink on a polished slab of limestone. The image is fixed with dilute gum arabic. Thereafter, each time one dampens the plate, then applies an oily printing ink, the ink stays only on the greasy parts, and prints in black. The process may sound an oily smear, but it reproduces the most sensitive touch of pen or brush, textured with the grain of the stone. In the nineteenth century lithography was used more in France than in England, above all by Honoré Daumier. An early masterpiece, Le Ventre législatif of 1834, shows his genius with black (illus. 77). The coats, waistcoats, lapels and hats show the different grades of broadcloth, silk and velvet which were then in fashion – especially in the stout foremost waistcoat – while the black eyes and eye shadows show other grades, of irony, misgiving, calculation.
By the later nineteenth century the development of photo engraving made possible the line-block, in which a drawing, in Indian ink on paper, is reproduced exactly. In Aubrey Beardsley’s cover for an 1894 issue of The Yellow Book, the dramatic, slender woman dressed in black can seem a touch demonic though she is also young and pretty – and a literary connoisseur (illus. 78). Her shallow profile suggests she is of mixed race, and her clear sexual magnetism provokes a suspicious, delectating stare in the old pot-bellied bookseller who is so oddly dressed in the white masquerade outfit of a commedia dell’arte Pierrot. With its steep perspective, and obscure menace, the drawing implies an ambiguous intrigue in the contents of this ‘illustrated quarterly’.
The development of photoengraving could occur only after the invention of photography – the most significant innovation in the century’s nurture of the black-and-white image. That invention effectively occurred in the 1820s, when pewter or copper plates were coated with light-sensitive compounds such as bitumen of Judea. The process became commercial with the development of the daguerreotype in the 1830s, in which copper is coated with iodized silver. It would be easy to demonstrate, in the deeply dark tones of early photographs, a ‘Caravaggesque’ or ‘Rembrandtesque’ use of chiaroscuro, in which the shadows on face and background abruptly deepen to black. The photograph Paula, Berlin by Alfred Stieglitz shows a broader continuity in European image-making (illus. 79). It could recall those paintings by Jan Vermeer in which a woman, lit by a bright window to the left, is almost still in thoughtful privacy. In Vermeer she may be reading a letter, as here she is writing one, while the shadows round her deepen to black. But Stieglitz’s photograph uses light and shadow in a way no painter would. The slats in the Venetian blind cast bars of shadow throughout the interior. This element of abstract pattern plays against other patterns (such as the finer grids of the wicker chair-back and the birdcage) and against the human clutter of photographs and paper hearts pinned to the wall. This effect has often been used later in film, most patently in the works of Orson Welles, most beautifully in the scene in Fellini’s La dolce vita in which the character played by Mastroianni meets briefly a young girl in a seaside tavern. He, she, all the tavern, are lightly crossed by thin lines of shadow from the reed sides and roof, which together with the light breeze contribute to the sense of an evanescent interruption within the orgiastic drift of the sweet life. In Paula, Berlin too the slats add a living indeterminacy.
77 Honoré Daumier, ‘Le Ventre législatif’, published in L’Association Mensuelle (18 January 1834), lithograph.
78 Aubrey Beardsley, cover for The Yellow Book (15 April 1894), line-block from drawing in Indian ink.
79 Alfred Stieglitz, Paula, Berlin, 1889, photograph.
80 Georges Seurat, The Artist’s Mother, 1882–3, Conté crayon on paper.
If photography was the newest art-black of the century, the oldest black of all continued, in the widespread use by artists of charcoal – charred sticks. The beautiful drawing of his mother by Georges Seurat is not actually in charcoal but in Conté crayon, but the interrupted play of the carbon stick on the roughness of the paper has the same eloquent materiality which the first artist found, when he or she outlined a prized animal on a cave wall with burned firewood (illus. 80). We see a flat, black-rubbed texture and a face sunk deep in time – in human time, through the distance of a life, and in art time too, since this picture made by the oldest means is modern in effect but recalls the art of Holbein.
GIVEN THE STRONG part played by black in nineteenth-century image-making – including the invention in 1840 of the photographic negative – it is no surprise to find that black had a positive character for those who wrote on optics. It is true that black lies outside the spectrum, but in any case there was a growing interest in colours beyond the colours we see. In 1800 Frederick William Herschel discovered invisible light when he held a thermometer with a blackened bulb just beyond the red end of the spectrum, and got a higher reading of heat than he had from the spectral colours. This un-seeable wavelength was named infra-red, and in 1801 Johann Wilhelm Ritter, working in the German city of Jena, discovered ultraviolet light when he placed silver chloride – which turns black in sunlight – beyond the other, violet end of the spectrum, and found that it darkened more intensely there than when placed among the visible colours.
The study of sight and optics extended to black’s role in design. When the French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul became director of the dye-works at the Gobelins Factory, most famous for its tapestries, he needed to understand how the perception of a colour affects the colours next to it. In The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours and Their Applications to the Arts (1839), the discussion of fundamentals is rich with incidental advice as to clothes, complexions, carpets. In clothing and pictures alike, he notes, a black will be tinted – but slightly – by the colour that is complimentary to the strong colour next to it (so black, next to red, will look slightly green). Also black looks less black when next to a dark colour – so soldiers who mean to be inconspicuous may wear, with black trousers, a sombre tunic. Addressing the elderly, he observes that black dims the tone of other clothes; and while black clothes make the skin look white, they also make flushed skin look redder, and redder again in a mottled complexion. He is concerned also for ‘the dress of women with black or olive skins’, noting that ‘if the complexion is intense black, or dark olive, or greenish-black, red is preferable to every other colour; if the black is bluish, then orange is particularly suitable. Yellow will best accord with a violet-black.’14
The most comprehensive investigation of sight was Hermann von Helmholtz’s Treatise on Physiological Optics (1856). Helmholtz was emphatic on the positive character of black: ‘Black is a real sensation, even if it is produced by entire absence of light. The sensation of black is distinctly different from the lack of all sensation.’15 Though emphatic, Helmholtz is not here analytical, and it remained for Karl Ewald Hering, in the 1880s, to argue that the receptors in the retina worked according to contrasts, and that the black-white receptors would signal their excitement both when they ‘saw’ white and when they ‘saw’ black. This view conforms to the current understanding of the way in which we see darks and blacks.
I have left until now Goethe’s Theory of Colours (1810), because it stands proudly separate from the broad development of colour theory. Goethe looks a degree perverse, since, in his determination to refute Newton, he refused to accept that the colours of the spectrum are contained in white light. White light, for Goethe, had to be pure, and he harks back to Aristotle in arguing that strong hues – crimson, gold, deep blues and greens – are made by mixing white light with darkness. And it is true, as he says, that yellow is a lighter colour than blue, and that efforts to deepen yellow pigments drive them down towards orange and red. But though he is mistaken on the nature of light – comparing Newton’s theory to an abandoned castle ‘nodding to its fall’ – he is minutely observant on the subjective a
spect of colour vision, noticing for instance that black or white objects will often seem to show a blue or red edge. Black has a primary value for him, since he argues that deep, rich colour is, as it were, a refraction of darkness – he speaks of ‘the dark nature of colour, its full rich quality’.16
Goethe’s theory was certainly of interest to England’s greatest painter (then and so far), J.M.W. Turner, who titled a late painting Colour and Light (Goethe’s Theory) – The Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis. And the element of mysticism in Goethe’s attitude to light and darkness would surely have appealed to Turner, whose representation of dazzling radiance – in Norham Castle, Sunrise for instance – can verge on the transcendental. As to black, it is notable that something dark or black often occupies a near-central position in Turner’s paintings. Often it is in tension with a radiant setting or rising sun, also near-centre, which is both the brightest and the furthest thing we see, while the dark object is near, and nothing stands between it and us. The most dramatic black central presence is the paddle steamer of death in Peace – Burial at Sea of 1842 (illus. 81). The black mast and sails stand tall like a silhouette crucifixion, reflecting the grief and reverence – at once artistic and religious – which Turner felt at the solemn committal to water of the remains of his great contemporary, the painter David Wilkie.
If not a sailboat in silhouette, the dark object may be a crag or a hazardous pile in shallow water. In several paintings, as in Peace, it may also be an item of the age’s new machinery, both black and luminous in its coal-fuelled steam power. In The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken Up (1838), the small paddle-wheeled tug which makes towards us is all black or brown, with a tall black funnel issuing brown-black smoke (illus. 82). The novelist and art critic William Makepeace Thackeray called the tug ‘spiteful’, ‘diabolical’ and a ‘little demon’ because of its contrast with the majestic, whitely luminous warship (whose redundant white sails are tightly furled). The painting is also, though, a portrait of irresistible power, with the tiny modern vessel pulling slowly but with ease the grand, doomed bulk behind it. The tug’s black is fiery, and there is clearly some comparison between the black and the white ship and the white beauty of the setting sun, which is attended by a light hang of red-black clouds, while an obscure, near-black object to the right rises ominously out of the water. Thackeray’s facetious demonism simplifies a picture that has a big ambiguity, in which a strong sense of fate or fatality is joined to an enormous peace and beauty.17
81 J.M.W. Turner, Peace – Burial at Sea, 1842, oil on canvas.
There is no such play of past and present in Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight, a Tyneside scene showing coals from Newcastle being loaded for London (illus. 83). What is remarkable, rather, is the way this scene of heavy labour, in a rising cloud of coal-dust, has struck Turner with its beauty. For the glory of moonlight at its brightest, made with grades of blue and silver, touches evenly the placid water and the labouring men, one of whom can be made out lifting high a shovel-load of coal. The men and boats are black as their coal, and the torchlight flares in places, but the regular activity has a calm: as it were, the peace of work, such as Turner too may have felt in the concentrated labour of painting. The whole scene may be quiet, except for the tumbling of coal in the chutes, for what struck Henry Mayhew in the London docks – at the other end of the coal-ships’ voyage – was the steady silence in which the coal-whippers lifted coal from the hold, compared with the songs the sailors sang when hauling up sails or turning a winch.18 The dark objects in the foreground here are the broad black bucket and wooden ladle – utensils presumably of the coal-trade – on the puzzling brown shape in the water near us: emblems, nonetheless, of the Industrial Revolution – which so far I have hardly mentioned, though it had so much to do with the blackening of the century.
82 J.M.W. Turner, The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken Up, 1838, oil on canvas.
83 J.M.W. Turner, Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight, 1835, oil on canvas.
TO MOVE, THEN, to the century’s ‘other black’. For the Industrial Revolution had reached its black fruition through the same run of dates that saw the growth of black fashion in menswear and home furnishings and the invention of new black techniques in art – that is, through the first half of the nineteenth century and especially in the four decades from 1800 to 1840.
The rise of coal, steel and steam had been in several senses black. As to dates, the mechanical revolution had gathered speed in the later eighteenth century. But though steam was harnessed in the 1760s, James Watt’s engine was relatively weak, working more by suction as the cylinder cooled than from the thrust of pressured steam. It could however pump water out of mineshafts, enabling coalmines to be dug deeper and with longer galleries, leading to the vast expansion of coal-production – reflected in Turner’s Keelmen – which fuelled home fires as well as manufacturies, spreading coal-smoke and soot over London as well as Birmingham.
Happily for the neat chronology of Virginia Woolf, it was specifically in the years 1800 to 1801 that the early engineers harnessed high-pressure steam. Now superheated steam under explosive pressure, inside cast-iron cylinders bored more finely than cannon had ever been, forced forward a heavily laden piston which turned a cast-iron wheel which drove a locomotive and trucks down a track (1804), or a ‘steamer’ through the sea (1802–7), or a shaft that ran the length of a workshop, turning belts that drove lines of lathes, drills, steel-shears and presses, or spinning mules or power looms. Thus the multiplying textile mills could leave the pleasant hills where they were driven by waterwheels (the water sometimes pumped by Watt’s engine) and move to the centre of the crowding towns, and help to make them jam-packed cities. For there, where labour lived, the steel factories grew, and the foundries which made cast iron, and there the new railways ferried coal easily, and iron ore from the ironstone quarries.
Consequently, in the English Midlands – in Birmingham, Walsall, Wolverhampton – the coal and coke were black, their cinders and ashes were grey or black, the smoke was black and the soot was black. The cinders from the furnaces were pounded down on dirt roads to make a surface, so the roads were black. The urban air became laden with flakes of soot, which were known as ‘blacks’. Both brick and stone – in factories, churches, new hospitals and homes – developed an acid black crust. It is possible that the area round Birmingham was known as ‘the Black Country’ before industry came, from the outcrop of coal seams which made the soil black, but this name gained massive currency in the 1830s and ’40s. Ruskin claimed that because of the soot ‘a beaten footpath, on a rainy day, near a manufacturing town’ turned to ‘the blackest slime’. Carlyle spoke of ‘the black air’.19
The ‘best finish’ for cast-iron goods – and for wrought iron too – was Berlin black, and larger products also wore black as a shield. Railway engines had been colourful when first invented – the Rocket, at the steam trials in 1829, was white and canary yellow – but locomotives soon found sooty reasons to be mainly black. The new ironclad steamships had great black hulls, though they were red below the waterline and often had white superstructures. Black was frequent in machinery because bitumen saved the iron from corrosion, and smaller new machines, less liable to damp, were also painted black, presumably by association. So, when their time came, sewing machines, early adding machines and typewriters were black – often with slender lines of gold for distinction.
And the workers who made the machines were black. Black-smiths were called black from ancient times because of the black ‘smithy scales’ (ferrosoferric oxide) which form on iron when forged. In the new blast furnaces the foundry workers were black with soot, coke and iron dust. Metalworkers in the workshops, making locks, keys and small machines, were black with iron dust and iron filings. A metalworker in Disraeli’s Sybil is ‘ricketty and smoke-dried, and black with his craft’. Dyers had ‘blue and black skins’. Coal-miners wore white clothes –
for visibility underground – but came home black from head to foot. And not only the men. As Disraeli describes a pithead:
They come forth . . . wet with toil, and black as the children of the tropics; troops of youth – alas! of both sexes . . . Naked to the waist, an iron chain fastened to a belt of leather runs between their legs clad in canvas trousers, while on hands and feet an English girl, for twelve, sometimes for sixteen hours a-day, hauls and hurries tubs of coals up subterranean roads, dark, precipitous, and plashy: circumstances that seem to have escaped the notice of the Society for the Abolition of Negro Slavery.
The English girl’s exact situation can be seen in a wood-engraving published three years before Sybil – as an illustration to the official report of the Children’s Employment Commission (Mines) which the Government had instituted (illus. 84). The girl is nearly naked because of the heat underground, and it is hard to imagine a clearer picture of a human being reduced to a beast of burden. Later in the narrative, Disraeli says the miners, eating and drinking at a pub, ‘looked like a gang of negroes at a revel’: the comparison is visual, and perhaps aloof, but the word ‘gang’ here refers specifically to the gang system used in slave plantations.20
It was however a foreign visitor who best described the black side of working life. In The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), Frederick Engels describes the bodily deformities fostered by a (short) working life in the mines; also the diseases, like the ‘Black spittle’, which come when the lung is saturated with coal-dust, producing a ‘thick, black mucous expectoration’. As to the mood of the working men, he quotes Carlyle on cotton spinners – ‘black, mutinous discontent devours them’ – and notes too the use of face-blacking when workers formed in ‘combinations’. He recalls that ‘in 1843, the famous “Rebecca” disturbances broke out among the Welsh peasantry; the men dressed in women’s clothing, blackened their faces, and fell in armed crowds upon the toll-gates, destroyed them amidst great rejoicing and firing of guns’. The illegal practice of blacking the face, used earlier by thieves and poachers, was now used by those active in political ‘agitation’. Charlotte Bronte, in her industrial novel Shirley, mentions a confrontation where the leader went on horseback to hide the fact that he had an artificial leg, while ‘the rest only had their faces blackened’.21
