Coalbrookdale à noite

When de Loutherbourg exhibited this in 1801, he was showing London something most Londoners had never seen, an iron foundry blazing through the night. These are the Bedlam furnaces in the Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire, one of the birthplaces of the Industrial Revolution, their coke fires throwing a red glare over the hills and a pall of smoke into the sky. He had toured the industrial districts a year or two earlier, sketching. In his day job he designed for the London stage and even built a famous show of moving painted scenery lit by coloured lamps, and that theatrical eye is everywhere here, in the way the furnace glow is staged like a distant fire seen across a dark valley.