ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that Constantin Meunier’s and Maximilien Luce’s fin de siecle Black Country landscapes emphasized pollution of the soil and atmosphere, the most visible negative effects of industrial development on nonhuman nature. It highlights the importance of coal in creating modernity around 1900, about 100 years after the start of the Anthropocene, an era defined by humans’ extreme impact on the environment through massive use of fossil fuels. Art critic Gustave Geffroy described Luce’s paintings as “industrial landscapes where factories activated by human labor vomit their fire and smoke into the skies”. Meunier’s and Luce’s works constitute a major change in the conceptualization of the relationship between industry and nature. In Luce’s paintings, the “assimilationist aesthetic” articulated by Greg Thomas in regard to Impressionist landscapes like those of Pissarro gives way to a full-blown industrial aesthetic, in which nature holds a secondary position in an area defined as industrial rather than rural.
