The Arts of Industry in the Age of the Enlightenment (review)

Whether contesting or endorsing the existence of a Scientific Revolution, historians of science still give pride of place to 1660, when the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge was founded. Celina Fox’s remarkable book makes an implicit case for 1771 being a more important date, for this was when the Society of Civil Engineers was founded. As Fox elegantly demonstrates (both in word and image), men who began to call themselves engineers and who produced careful reports containing copious technical drawings and empirical observations and descriptions merged empiricism and theory in a way early members of the Royal Society only hyperbolized about.

Beginning with an account of the history of trades projects of Francis Bacon and the Royal Society, in which she brings to light new information and fascinating new drawings by John Evelyn and Robert Hooke, Fox proceeds through six different arenas in which fine art and the mechanical arts interacted in the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries, namely, drawing, model-making, the foundation of societies for the advancement of the arts, publications (mainly encyclopedias and dictionaries) on the arts, portraits of mechanical artist-entrepreneurs, and scenes of industry. She traces the development of each of these art forms (mainly in Britain but at times drawing in relevant continental comparisons) in great detail with stunning illustrations, relying on both the most recent scholarship and, more impressively still, remarkable archival work and what must amount to years of labor in various image collections and libraries in Europe. The result is an original account of the representation of the mechanical arts by both “liberal” and “mechanical” artists that is of extraordinary scope and depth.

Fox makes an important contribution to recent literature in the history of science and technology that highlights the interaction between artisans and scholars in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She argues that, although no rigid distinction between mechanical artists and mechanical philosophers can be consistently drawn in the eighteenth century, the gap between mechanics and scientists increased through the nineteenth century, with the Great Exhibition of 1851 being a “cultural battlefield” (p. 493). This widening divide was in part due to the “cranking of the wheels of professional aggrandizement” (p. 84) among artists, engineers, architects, and others, a process that had been going on since the Renaissance. In Britain, it was also due to the constant struggle in the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (founded 1754) over whether the “Arts” meant the fine arts of representation in painting and sculpture or the mechanical arts. This was not a purely academic debate, as the society gave out impressive sums of money as premiums for promising inventions, including well-executed drawings and paintings.

While Fox pursues this overarching argument about the relationship between the fine and mechanical arts across most of the chapters, each also has a separate focus, with those on drawing and model-making constituting the most sustained examination of the slow consolidation of theory and practice in the production of scientific-technical knowledge by surveyors, budding engineers, “coal viewers” (who advised on and directed colliery design, construction, and development), and others, such as John Smeaton and James Watt, whose drawings and models necessitated practical experiences on site in order to make them workable in the real world. Through this translation of mathematicized design into actual “effects” in nature, a new method was constituted and codified; it had only been proclaimed by Francis Bacon and seventeenth-century new philosophers.

The vision of this new method was disseminated by itinerant lecturers (often using mechanical models), by societies and academies, by encyclopedias of the arts and trades, by commissioned portraits of artisans and mechanics, and, finally, by scenes of industry. Interestingly, by 1800 the latter had become mainly Romantic scenes in which “human industry and mechanical ingenuity were dwarfed by the elemental forces of nature” (p. 444), at the same time that Romantic ideas of genius...