Miners in Art and Pitmen Painters

Great interest is now being shown in the art produced in the 1930s by miners, in particular those who have become known as The Ashington Group, although there are others.

William Feaver’s acclaimed book, Pitmen Painters: The Ashington Group 1934-1984 first brought to the world's attention the art being produced by a group of miners from the north of England.  Then Lee Hall, author of Billy Elliot came across the book and wrote his  highly successful play The Pitmen Painters.

Both the book and the play have been crucial to ensuring that these miners’ works won’t be forgotten.

 You can visit The Ashington Group's own website by clicking on this link.

Thinking about it, though, there are few "high art" paintings of British miners working at the coal face compared to the daily lives of fishermen, weavers or farm workers. In fact miners, even on the pit surface, are rarely represented.

Why would established artists not get to grips with such a dramatic scenario? There are a number of interesting reasons for this artistic gap.

The lives of those who toiled on land and sea were popular subjects for high art because they were often metaphors for religion. A Biblical reference can add to the status of such working lives, making it acceptable to grace the walls of the rich patron.

There were obvious practical reasons for artists being unable or unwilling to portray miners at work at that period, even if they wanted to. Lack of light, lack of room and the dangerous conditions below ground were contributing factors.

However, there were not only physical constraints preventing the portrayal of miners in high art. There were social constraints too.

Because miners worked underground, in the dark, and were never seen at work, they were associated with the underworld, or Hades, whose imagined devils struck fear into the hearts of many. Therefore, miners themselves, as a group, were feared.

During the Industrial Revolution miners were regarded with suspicion by the upper classes because
they were seen to be militant and aggressive - as they had good reason to be.

They were often treated like a different species of human being; emerging blackened from the pit, they looked, to upper class observers, like creatures from a strange land. Cartoons in the magazine Punch gleefully recorded such situations with journalistic malice.

With Victorian social reform, mining communities became the focus of many philanthropic reports giving evidence to various bodies on the conditions of children and workers employed in mines. These publications carried emotive illustrations meant to shock the public, but were regarded by the mining communities themselves as sensationalist misrepresentations by outsiders who failed to understand their world.

The Victorian social realist novels of the 1850s and 1860s (such as those written by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens and George Eliot) began to explore working class life so that it came to be seen as having its own integrity and value.

Miners, above ground, began slowly to appear in high art as realistic figures worthy of representation in their own right. Some artists worth examining in this respect are James Clark Hook, William Bell Scott and Ralph Hedley.

 The Graphic, a magazine launched in the mid-1800s, with a social and political slant, carried realistic and sympathetic representations of miners. Van Gogh was particularly interested in these editions and obtained copies when he was living in England.

The Impressionists and English artists like Walter Sickert began to portray working class lives without the Victorian heroic or tragic sentimentality.

In particular, ex-miner, Norman Cornish, is regarded as the greatest living artist of mining life. His work, and those of his fellow miner artists, is extremely important today because of the closure of the pits and the loss of the community life that was once so strong.

You can see a collection of his paintings by clicking on his official website.  It really is worth a look.

The Pitmen Painters may not have been able to paint directly at the coal face - they were too busy working -  but their pictures are from their memories and, as such, are a record of the true life of those lost mining communities.

And no doubt, at this moment in time, there are similar projects gathering dust in communities who have no means of reaching a wider public.

Sources:

• Notes from a Lecture, "The Miner in Art" given by Dr Gail-Nina Anderson at The Kings Place Gallery, London on 12th April, 2010.
• "The Working Man's Art" by Dr Gail-Nina Anderson in Norman Cornish: A Shot Against Time (Northumbria University Gallery and Kings Place Gallery, 2010)