Summary

Oil painting on canvas, The Excavation of the Manchester Ship Canal: Eastham Cutting with Mount Manisty in the distance by Benjamin Williams Leader RA (Worcester 1831 – Shere 1923), signed and dated bottom right: R. W. LEADER 1891. It depicts the construction of the ship canal. Lent by the Rt. Hon. Lord Egerton to the Rome International Exhibition, 1911, no.237 (information provided by Martin Hopkinson).

Full description

A curiously intricate web of interconnections links together canal-building in Britain, this particular canal, those who built it, and the families of the man who painted this picture of it and of the one for whom it was painted. At the same time, it is an austerely impressive aesthetic celebration of the Industrial Revolution, by an artist better known for what his detractors stigmatise as evasive fantasies of rural England: a painter more celebrated for February Fill-Dyke than for half-flooded massive mechanical excavations . Cheap and reliable transport was one of the essential preconditions of the Industrial Revolution. Before the advent of the railways, canals were the key to ensuring this; their greatest promoter then was Francis Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater (1736-1803). In 1887, after N.M. Rothschild & Sons had met with an initial setback in raising the necessary capital to construct the Manchester Ship Canal, Wilbraham Egerton, 2nd Baron & 1st Earl Egerton of Tatton (1832-1909), head of a cadet line of the same family, was appointed Chairman of the company, to restore confidence . This he did, in part by himself becoming the single largest investor, remaining as chairman until the Canal was opened in 1894. He also sold the land on which Manchester Docks were built. It was he who commissioned from the artist this picture of the site where construction began, where he had himself cut the first sod (with a spade preserved at Tatton) on 11th November, 1887; Leader's first sketch and his half-size modello of the work, both of which are at Tatton, were bought by his nephew, Maurice, 4th & last Baron Egerton of Tatton, at Leader's widow's sale at Christie's, 8th April 1927. Benjamin Williams Leader was born Benjamin Leader Williams, the second son of Edward Leader Williams, Chief Engineer to the Severn Navigation Commission, and younger brother of Sir Edward Leader Williams (1828-1910), the engineer of Shoreham Harbour and Dover Docks, and Engineer successively to the River Weaver Trust, the Bridgewater Navigation Company, and the Manchester Ship Canal (1882ff.). He thus had inland waterways, so to speak in his blood. He transposed his surname and second christian-name in 1857 to avoid confusion, as he said, a dozen other regular exhibitors at the Royal Academy with the name of Williams, including a whole family in his speciality, landscape. Leader was too young to have absorbed anything from Constable's stay with his father on his visit to Worcester in 1835, and from the unsold paintings exhibited by the artist at the Worcester Institution that are reputed to have been left with the latter for a time, Glebe Farm and Lock on the Stour . His own earliest landscapes fell under quite different influence: that of the pre-Raphaelites. He achieved considerable early success, with his pictures being bought by such fellow-artists as Thomas Creswick, Alfred Elmore, and David Roberts, and The Old Church at Bettws-y-Coed by Gladstone . But his move to Whittington, near Worcester, in 1862 initiated a period of what had begun to seem like provincial eclipse, that was only broken with the astonishing response that February Fill-Dyke (1881, Birmingham City Art Gallery; reduced version, 1881, City of Manchester Art Galleries) and In the evening there shall be light (1882, Manchester City Art Gallery) evoked amongst visitors to the Royal Academy. By the time that Leader was invited to paint the present picture therefore, it need by no means have been on the strength of his being the brother of the engineer to the Manchester Ship Canal alone, though Lusk does say that it was originally undertaken at the instance of the latter . It must also have been in Lord Egerton's mind that an artist whose particular strength was in the depiction of "rain-filled rutty roads", and who was praised because he: "loves a flooded country in late November, with the dark land and leafless trees defined against a golden sky" , was not inapt as a choice to portray the seemingly unpromising subject of the scarred earth and half-flooded workings of the initial excavation of a canal. Leader's response to the scene also shows that he was much more than the mere veristic but elegiac recorder of a vanishing countryside dismissed by his detractors - but which, in his later years, he did indeed become. It reveals instead some of the qualities that brought him honours and distinction in France, and that encouraged two Frenchmen, Chauvel and Brunet-Debaines, to etch his work: "As it was often said, then and afterwards, Leader's pictures seem to have been made for the etcher; all their strength and charm of design was seen at its best, and their crudity of colour disappeared" . The half-size modello for this picture, also at Tatton - which it would have been very tempting to borrow instead of the finished picture, had its scale only matched that of the other pictures in this room - is, indeed, virtually monochrome, as well as reducing the human figures and machinery to insignificance. It lays bare, as it were, the musculature that underlies Leader's seemingly artless compositions. The machinery that occupies a conspicuous position in the foreground looks rudimentary, but was singularly effective. As Sir Bosdin Leech described the Eastham section of the workings: "Steam navvies of the Ruston and Proctor type (commonly but incorrectly called American devils) were driving their sharp teeth into the hillside and removing tons of soil into long strings of waggons, which as soon as possible were drawn away to a tip by small engines ..." The record removal of earth by one of these steam navvies in a day's work (twelve hours) was 557 wagons, or 2,500 tons by weight; of sand, 640 wagons, or 2,500 cubic yards . Eastham may have been chosen for the locus of this picture not merely because it was where the excavations for the Canal began, but also because it had previously been a beauty spot, known as the "Richmond of the Mersey",- with woods and foliage - visible on the right (and made more of in the initial sketch) - extending down to the estuary, which sweeps here in a noble curve, beside the future canal. The mound in the background, 'Mount Manisty' is, however, no natural formation, but a heap of soil from the workings, named after the Contractor's Agent of this first section of the canal. It is part of Leader's achievement that, without in any way glamorising the raw process of excavation, he has managed to fuse it with the beauty of the sky and of the estuary, to produce an image with its own sort of power and beauty. Notes: (i) Even the urbane Kenneth Clark lost his cool when analysing the - to him - spurious appeal of this picture in Landscape into Art [1949] (paperback edn., 1956, pp.100-101), describing the supposed photographic truth of it as a "squalid claim". (ii) For the construction and history of the canal, see Sir Edward Leader Williams, The Manchester Ship Canal, The Institution of Civil Engineers, Paper No. 3046, 1898; and Sir Bosdin Leech, History of the Manchester Ship Canal, Manchester & London, 1907. (iii) See obituary in The Times, 23 March 1923, p.15. Glebe Farm (Hoozee, no.536) is curiously prefatory of Leader. Lock on the Stour appears to be a confusion with .... (iv) For the similar Churchyard, Bettws-y-Coed (1863, Guildhall Art Gallery), see exh.cat. Landscape in Britain 1850 -1950, Arts Council, Hayward Gallery, &c., 1983, no.36. (v) See the excellent entry written around this last by Rosemary Treble, in exh. cat. Great Victorian Pictures, Arts Council, Leeds City Art Gallery, &c., 1978, no.27. (vi) Lewis Lusk, 'The Life & Work of B.W. Leader, R.A.', The Art Annual, 1901, p.23. (vii) J.E. Hodgson, Fifty Years of British Art, 1887, pp.89 -90, quoted in exh.cat.cit. (viii)Obituary in The Times. (ix) History of the Manchester Ship Canal, vol.II, pp.22,34 & 54 and pl.opp.p.20. (adapted from author's version/pre-publication, Alastair Laing, In Trust for the Nation, exh. cat., 1995)