Read Ebook: Joseph Pennell's Pictures of the Wonder of Work Reproductions of a Series of Drawings Etchings and Lithographs Made by Him about the World 1881-1915 with Impressions and Notes by the Artist by Pennell Joseph

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POWER-HOUSE, BERLIN, GERMANY LI

SCHNAPPS AT SCHIEDAAM, HOLLAND LII

I BUILDING THE PUBLIC BUILDINGS

This etching proves that my love of the Wonder of Work is no new thing, for it was done in 1881, out of my studio window in Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, on the hot morning that Garfield was shot. Even then I knew what I wanted to do, but I had no idea that--with certain breaks--all my life would be given to the Wonder of Work--the work that is all about us, the most wonderful thing in the world.

II THE NEW HOUSE, PHILADELPHIA

I can remember the bed of mortar in the street, the hod-carrier toiling up the ladder, the bricklayers above on the scaffold, and I have drawn such things; but to find during one's lifetime such a development of building in my own city is amazing, but it is well worth recording--this phase of the Wonder of Work.

One hot summer evening I was asked to dine at the University Club, and this drawing is the result. I had no idea that I would get anything but--as one always does in Philadelphia--a good dinner. I have forgotten the good dinner and the doubtless good talk, but I shall never forget the towering buildings, in the coming night, grouped round the low houses, and the dark hole from which the steel skeleton was emerging, soon to become higher and mightier than the grim masses amid which it was growing. So I came back the next day and drew it.

IV OIL REFINING, POINT BREEZE

V OIL WELLS, ALBERTA

I have never yet found a perfectly satisfactory oil field, as a subject for the Wonder of Work. The wells are not big enough, they are all alike, and there is no smoke. I confess I once thought an oil well gushed like a geyser, hundreds of feet in the air, and, when it was not doing that, belched forth gorgeous columns and clouds of smoke. I was told that the first was prevented with difficulty, and that by dropping a match into the pipe I could easily produce the second effect--though either might cost me a million; still, the fact remains, I have yet to find a really fine oil field--and a really fine effect over it. The refineries, however, make up for the wells.

VI STEEL AT GARY, INDIANA

If there is anything in carrying on tradition it is here, for here at these new works, the engineers, the steel makers, have built mills which are nothing more than Rembrandt's mills glorified and magnified. And everything in the Wonder of Work is only carrying on tradition. Every mill, every dock, every railroad station, every bridge, every skyscraper is but a development of the work of the Greeks and Romans. In trying to show this Wonder of Work to-day I am only trying to do what has been done already with Greek art and literature. We are not original and never can be. We may believe we are and prove ourselves ignorant or cubists, but the cubists are so ignorant--or think the public are--that they only prig from archaic art. We can carry on tradition with difficulty; we can easily turn backward or stand still. Those who have created the Wonder of Work do not turn back--artists do not--duffers do.

Here is the real Chicago. This was the first of these jaws I ever saw; they are horrible, but fascinating, and typify the power, frightfulness, and get-there of that mighty village: picturesque beyond words, terrible beyond description, fascinating beyond belief. The most amazing thing in the most amazing mix-up in the world--Chicago.

The lines of the pens or corrals, or whatever they are called, are fascinating to draw--and fascinating it is to watch the picadors, or cowboys, or whatever you call them, rounding up the cattle, and all the lines of the design lead up to the packing-houses which fill the distance. I have never been in them, don't want to go, and have no interest in the social, financial, or sanitary condition of them. I am always being criticised for lacking interest in such matters, but my critics do not realize I am simply an artist searching for the Wonder of Work--not for morals--political economy--stories of sweating--the crime of ugliness. I am trying to record the Wonder of Work as I see it, that is all.

Bridges should be seen sometimes from below--from nowhere else are they so impressive. The New York bridges become a thousand times more impressive, the Forth Bridge stretches on forever, the Viaduct de Garibault grows more and more graceful, the bridges at Chicago grimmer. This is the grimmest I have found.

X THE CAMBRIA STEEL WORKS, JOHNSTOWN

Always when I have been going or coming east or west on the Pennsylvania and reached Johnstown I have meant to stop, for from the train it seemed so fine. Now I have stopped and know it is far finer than I imagined, and that there are endless subjects up and down the river banks, but this one of the steel works seems to me the finest--as magnificent as any I have ever seen anywhere.

Way down below the level road on which I stood, way on the opposite side of the river, Pittsburgh lies a dark, low mass, hemmed in by its rivers, lorded by its hills; in the hollow the smoke hangs so dense often I could not see the city at all, but once in a while a breeze falls on the town, and the great white skyscrapers come forth from the thick, black cloud, and the effect is glorious--the glorification of Work, for Pittsburgh is the work-city of the world.

I found these works and this view of them on a trolley ride out of Pittsburgh. They group themselves under their canopy of smoke as finely as any in the world, and every works in the Wonder of Work has character--just as a tree has--but how much more impressive is a row of blast furnaces, oil wells, and coal breakers, than trees! Yet these are the subjects of our age--naturally, scarcely any one ever looks at them, especially artists--though I hear the "young artists" of America have with money prizes been encouraged to take up "Labor" as a change from painting "murals"--but you can't help people to be artists or to see things, they must do it for themselves. The only artists who see things in the world are engineers and a few architects, for the mill has taken the place of the cathedral--and the great craftsmen who once worked for Popes now work for captains of industry--for art follows money.

A few years ago it would have been impossible to have done, or even found, the subjects in this book, for one would have had an impossible tramp, or a trip in a hack, and the nuisance and expense of it all, while the roads rarely went near the mills or works. Now the trolley whisks you about, and frequently deserts the roads to get to the mills and pick up its passengers, the workmen. The trolley is by far the best guide to the Wonder of Work in the world. I had no idea what was at Bessemer--or rather on the way to it. I had been in the works, but as the car mounted the hill I saw the subject behind me, and at the next stop jumped off and drew it, and it is in this way my work has been done. It's all adventure--the adventure of hunting for the Wonder of Work, and the love of the hunt has carried me all over Europe and America.

In the works at Homestead what interested me was the way the mills lie under the hills on the curving river, the way that winds up to them, the way the graceful iron bridges span it, and the deep-sighing steamboats push the barges up and down; the way the clouds mingle with the smoke--the composition that is there.

One afternoon, hunting for subjects, I took the trolley from Mahanoy City in the sunset to Shenandoah, and as we breasted a hill this is what I saw: the long lines of crosses are trolley poles--the huge castle a coal breaker, the great town American, but the people, the miners who go to the churches which crown it, speak languages and worship creeds I do not know or understand. There, and not in Philadelphia, are the new Americans--but most Americans do not know it--for their ways are not Philadelphia ways, and their thoughts not those of Spruce Street. And there is not a man among them who speaks English hardly--and they are too ignorant to know that England is their "Mother Land." But there is even more ignorance in Spruce Street.

From the end of the new bridge which has replaced the wonderful old wooden ones that got one somehow across the Susquehanna and other American rivers, wandering just at sunset up the beautiful bank of the beautiful river, I found this splendid subject. All, many would say, that was wanted were some knights bringing home fair ladies; all, others would say, was the poor workman, trudging, filled with Millet sentiment, whiskey, or his wrongs, to the filthy hole he is allowed to live in and call his--for the time--home; for these mining towns, the fault of their inhabitants, are pigsties--pigsties that no government in any country in the world but this would permit. It is only in America that immigrants live like hogs--as they like--no government in Europe would permit it. I have seen both hemispheres and know most social reformers have not--and would not know if they had. We are trying to clean up the world before we can clean our back yards. But I only looked at the coal breaker as making, perfecting, carrying out a composition in a glorious landscape, and for that reason I sat down and drew it.

The purists and the theorists have made a great fuss about the destruction of the Falls and the vandals who have done it. Now the Falls, I believe, have not been lowered an inch, and as for the power-houses, they are most of them Greek temples, and placed just where the Greeks would have placed them. For once the Greek temple is right in America, and therefore the American purist and theorist doesn't like it--he would not have liked Greek temples had he been Greek. I did not draw the temples, but the temples being built, which was interesting. Below the bridge on the American side are older works, wondrous works, high on the cliffs, great overflows of water gushing from the rock. If they were in Tivoli the purists would sit down between two trains and snapshot the ?"cute?" Villa d?'Else and the ?"hansome?" Villa of Hadrian, or revile the spaghetti, while a courier quoted Baedeker at them. At Niagara they take off their clothes, put their feet on the piazza rail of the Canadian hotel, sigh over the power-houses, delight in ginger-ale, and forget the Falls, in the pages of a Saturday Home Magazine. This lithograph is a proof that engineers design to-day for companies, not churches.

This was the end, and a most pictorial end, of the old Everett House, a hotel which had character as so few now have--in New York. I saw it one cold November night and made the sketch on my way to a dinner party in old New York. The dinner waited till I got a sketch done, for I knew the construction man would not. So it was done.

Here is a moody colossus--sometimes it is fine, sometimes filthy. It was all right the day I made this drawing, stately amid the clouds. One thing it has done--it has made a new sky line and brought New York together again. It comes up best from the river, but no longer do the Brooklyn river-boats run; from them I used to get the best views. Still, there are other ways of seeing the Wonder of Work even now at New York.

XX BUTTE, MONTANA, ON ITS MOUNTAIN TOP

Butte is the most pictorial place in America--therefore no one stops at it--and most people pass it in the night, or do not take the trouble to look out of the car windows as they go by. But there it is. On the mountain side spring up the huge shafts. The top is crowned not with trees but with chimneys. Low black villages of miners' houses straggle toward the foot of the mountain. The barren plain is covered with gray, slimy masses of refuse which crawl down to it--glaciers of work--from the hills. The plain is seared and scored and cracked with tiny canyons, all their lines leading to the mountain. If you have the luck to reach the town early in the morning you will find it half revealed, half concealed in smoke and mist and steam, through which the strange shafts struggle up to the light, while all round the horizon the snow peaks silently shimmer above the noisy, hidden town. If you have the still better fortune to reach it late in the evening you will see an Alpine glow that the Alps have never seen. In the middle of the day the mountains disappear and there is nothing but glare and glitter, union men and loafers about.

I have seen many volcanoes, a few in eruption--that was terrible--but this great smelter at Anaconda always, while I was there, pouring from its great stack high on the mountain its endless cloud pall of heavy, drifting, falling smoke, was more wonderful--for this volcano is man's work and one of the Wonders of Work. Dead and gray and bare are the nearby hills, glorious the snow-covered peaks far off, but incredible is this endless rolling, changing pillar of cloud, always there, yet always different--and that country covered with great lakes, waterless, glittering, great lava beds of refuse stretching away in every direction down the mountain sides into the valleys, swallowing up every vestige of life, yet beautiful with the beauty of death--a death, a plague which day by day spreads farther and farther over the land--silently overwhelming, all-devouring--a silent place of smoke and fire.

The lines of the winding waterways, each leading to a furnace, a mill, an elevator, are simply beautiful and the color absolutely lovely. This is the modern landscape--a landscape that Claude would have loved. All his composition is in it--only the mills have replaced the palaces, the trestle the aqueduct; instead of the stone pine, there stands the water tower; instead of the cypress, the automatic signal; instead of the Cross, the trolley pole. Soon, however, all this will go--the mystery of the smoke will vanish in the clearness of electricity, and the mystery of the trestle in the plainness of the concrete bridge. But it is here now, and the thing is to delight in it. Artists don't see it--and the railroad men who have made it don't know any more than the Greeks what a marvellous thing they have made.

Mighty, terrifying are these monsters--filled chock-full with ore, which, when the empty steamers come alongside, vomit roaring red and gold and brown streams of ore that load them in half an hour, or less, and then are ready for more.

If one wants an idea of what the Culebra Cut looked like, when the Panama Canal was being dug through the mountains, it is only necessary to go to the ore mines near Duluth. There are the same great terraces, the same steam shovels, digging and loading the dirt, the same engines and trains, and in some of the pits the forms are even fine--amphitheatres,--only the seats and steps are gigantic. But when the shadows begin to creep up from below, the place becomes a theatre for the gods, a theatre where there are no spectators, and the actors are the steam shovels with their white plumes and the engines with their black clouds. But they are finer far than any poor mummer's makeshifts. And every now and then comes a burst of applause as a blast is fired more thrilling than ever heard in a play theatre. This is the theatre of the Wonder of Work.

The mills of Minneapolis are as impressive as the cathedrals of France. There are places on the river where they group themselves into the same compositions, with the bridges below them, that I found years ago at Albi--only the color is different: the rosy red of the French brick is changed to dull concrete gray. The tree masses below are the same, and the old stone railroad bridge over the Mississippi is just as drawable as that over the Tarn. The beauty of the flour mills is the beauty of use--they carry out William Morris's theory that "everything useful should be beautiful"--but I don't know what he would have said to them. There are other subjects which recall Tivoli, where the streams gush out from the bluffs or tumble and rush and roar from dark caverns between the huge modern masses of masonry as finely as they do in far-away Italy. Those were the shrines of the gods--these are the temples of work, the temples of our time.

There are hundreds of these inclines--ascenseurs, finiculari, in the world--all fascinating from above or below--but I know of none so fascinating as this even among the numbers at Cincinnati--none in which the pitch is steeper, the stop so sudden--none where the streets lead direct to the heart of the city; no city so dominated, concentrated, at its heart, by its lone white skyscraper, as Cincinnati. That is why I drew it; and, as I drew, the boy who opened and shut the gates came and told me he wanted to be a poet, that he was a poet, and that Poe was the greatest American author, which most great Americans do not know, and that he loved Shelley, and so I recommended Whitman to him, of whom he had not heard, and advised him to attend to his gates and his poetry and then he might do something. And he asked me if I had done anything myself. If I had made good! Well, have I?

A triumph of misdirected work which has swallowed millions with no result--only while it was being built, the scaffolding which surrounded it was magnificent, and from where I made the drawing on the Palatine it told the story of ancient, mediaeval, and modern work in Rome.

The changes in the methods of work between Canaletto's time and mine were never more clearly shown. When he drew the building being restored, it was hidden in scaffolding; when it was rebuilt, as I saw it, a few years ago, everything was done from the inside, till the top was reached, men and materials being carried up on elevators. It is said one of our ingenious American Captains of Labor offered to rebuild it free if the Venetians would let him put two elevators in, and have the profits of them for twenty-five years, after which he would hand it to the city and retire on the results. The Syndic declined, but put in the elevators.

I have never seen anything so impressive as the quarries at Carrara. The great white masses one can see as the train passes Carrara station, or from Pisa, are not snow, as many think, but marble--high on the tops of the mountains, quarried for centuries by regiments of men who toil on foot, in trains or are swung up in baskets to the summit. Then down the roughest track, only smoothed by the blocks, the marble is dragged by teams of oxen, driven by men sitting backward, to the railroad or the harbor. The contrast between the dazzling blocks, the blue sky and black trees, and untouched mountain side is intense.

XXX THE NEW BAY OF BAIE, ITALY

I have no doubt I shall be told I am cheekily reckless to tackle Turner's subject--I have even known a collector to get rid of this print with scorn--but I am glad I drew it. I do not know if Turner made his drawing from the same point. Just where, after the long climb up the hill from Naples, between the cliffs, the road begins to descend, it turns, and all this is before you. I do not know whether it will be in existence when the book appears, or battered to ruin, but I do know that nowhere in the world is there such a combination of classic and mediaeval motives and the spirit of modern work as in this view from the top of the hill looking down on the land and the sea near Naples.

In Italy alone can the wonder of the old and new work be found. This subject must have been sketched by Claude--for these two lighthouses appear--or others like them--possibly at Civita Vecchia, again and again in his paintings. But he never saw the harbor crowded with steamers, the twinkling lines of electric light, the cranes, the engines and the docks. I have, and have tried to draw them all.

I saw this extraordinary effect one day at Leeds. Nothing could be finer than the way the great, strange furnaces told like castles--and they are work castles--against the great white clouds of a summer day in England.

On its little hill, entirely covering it among the Five Towns, stands this work town. Pottery kilns and chimneys, and not church spires and campanile, crown it. But in that land of work--coal mines and factory stacks about--it is perfect as a composition--as fine as any of the little towns Rembrandt drew and D?rer built. I don't even know its name.

Slow-moving, filthy, black--here and there gleams of iridescence lovely as old glass--that come from oil waste on the water--it winds smellily through the Black County of England. There are many of these rivers in the world. Over them brood black, murky clouds, great black chimneys vomit black smoke, and then for a moment the sun breaks through and turns all to glory.

There it stood, solitary--beyond, behind, below--climbing up the endless hills silhouetting the horizon, revealed and hidden by showers, smoke, clouds, chimneys and chimneys and chimneys--the endless landmarks of industrial England.

This etching illustrates, too, the necessity of doing the Wonder of Work when you find a subject, and not saying, "I will come again and do it later"--and you must find your subjects for yourself: no one can tell you where there is a fine smoke effect or a stunning steam jet. I had made the etching and later was in Bradford again and went back to look at it. Not only had it all been fenced in, but a new factory was being built round it--it had completely disappeared.

Along the sunny Thames still linger the old docks, old warehouses--worked in the old out-of-date way--mostly by hand. Ashore and afloat the port of London is the most out-of-date place in the world--and it's scarcely even picturesque any longer.

This is the Volcano of Work, and the blast furnaces are its crater. Right in the town, but below it, surrounded by high hills, it stands, and you can, from the corner of the Grande Rue, look down into the seething depths of it--and every little while it pants, it roars, and then explodes in fire and fume. This drawing was made from the hills opposite the town, but shows how like the crater of a volcano the whole place is.

Nowhere have I ever seen the old and the new so contrasted as here, both mills working--both pictorial--and both probably now destroyed.

XL THE LAKE OF FIRE, CHARLEROI, BELGIUM

XLI THE GREAT DUMP, CHARLEROI, BELGIUM

Near all great works these great dumps are, but none I have seen are so great as those of Belgium. The refuse is carried by travellers to them, received either by girls who no longer dress as Meunier saw them, but in coarse, thick, short gowns, their hair tied up in white towels. Or the slag and dirt are dumped directly on the growing mountain, and this refuse falls in the most beautiful lines and the most lovely grays and browns, like velvet or the fur of some huge beast, which grows and grows, towering over the chimneys, the furnaces looming up through the smoke, always growing and growing, fed by the travellers which carry to it an endless chain of creaking buckets high in air, sometimes for a kilometre, over ploughed fields and slow-moving rivers, to these work mountains.

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