- 24 January 2025
- 1:00 – 2:00 pm
- This event is part of the Paul Mellon Centre’s Spring Research Lunch series 2025.
- Paul Mellon Centre
In 1818, J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) visited Newcastle, North Shields and South Shields, key centres of Britain’s coal trade. The nocturnal labour of the keelmen – workers who transported and loaded locally mined coal onto seagoing ships along the River Tyne – inspired the watercolour Shields, on the River Tyne (1823), engraved for the Rivers of England series, and the oil painting Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight (1835). The latter, commissioned by Lancashire cotton industrialist Henry McConnel, functioned as a pendant to Turner’s Venice: The Dogana at San Giorgio Maggiore (1834), contrasting Tyneside’s bustling productivity with Venice’s stagnating commercial empire.
Turner’s focus on the keelmen is both historically significant and unsettling. In the 1820s, this essential workforce was revolting against the rise of railways and coal drops – technologies that endangered their livelihoods and rendered their labour increasingly obsolete. Their strikes disrupted the coal trade, driving up prices and causing significant financial losses for colliery owners.
This paper argues that Turner’s depiction of the volatile coexistence of manual labour, industrial machinery and mineral combustion on the Tyne offers an ambivalent celebration of the keelmen’s resistance to the erosion of communal labour structures in 1830s Britain. It demonstrates that Shields and Keelmen respond to the keelmen’s widely discussed strikes in the 1820s while engaging with geological narratives of Northumberland’s vast mineral wealth. For McConnel, Keelmen likely evoked uneasy parallels with his own workers’ resistance to steam-powered mechanisation in the cotton mills. The paper contends that Turner’s sublime vocabulary stages a confrontation between coal power and social power, exposing the loss of life and community underpinning Britain’s intertwined exploitation of fossil fuels and labour in the 1820s and 30s.
Image credit: Joseph Mallord William Turner, Shields, on the River Tyne, watercolour on paper, 15.4 × 21.6 cm. Digital image courtesy of Tate (D18155)
About the speaker
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Caterina Franciosi is a PhD candidate at Yale University, specialising in nineteenth-century British art and science. Her dissertation, Latent Light: Energy and Nineteenth-Century British Art, examines how artworks, exhibition spaces and objects envisioned and interrogated the ecological and sociopolitical conditions of Britain’s nineteenth-century energy regimes. Caterina holds an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art and a BA from John Cabot University, Rome. In Spring 2025, she will be a Junior Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.