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Category: industrial revolution

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The Art of Sleeplessness

Our sleep cycle was destroyed by gas lighting and factory night-shifts. How do we get it back?

Arkwright’s Cotton Mills by Night, c. 1782, Joseph Wright of Derby, courtesy Wikiart.
As we close in on the winter solstice, dusk falls at a little after 3 PM here. My ancestors would have crawled into bed early and slept long. Instead, I click on the lights and continue to work or play with my phone until 10 PM.
Looking out my nephew’s bedroom window on Thanksgiving night, I noticed that it wasn’t truly dark. The sky was a lovely phthalo blue, with a band of light at the horizon. That was Washington, DC, 65 miles away.
Meanwhile, we suffer an international epidemic of insomnia. How did we get here, and how do we get back? According to the World Health Organization, two-thirds of adults in developed nations aren’t getting the recommended 8 hours of sleep a night. There has been a global rise in sleep disorders such as insomnia and sleep apnea. In Japan, the average time spent asleep is just 6 hours and 22 minutes. It isn’t much better here, where we average 6.8 hours of sleep a night—down significantly over the last century. Since sleep deprivation is linked to a host of diseases from cancer to obesity to heart attacks to cognitive difficulties, that’s a very bad trend.
Joseph Wright of Derby was a painter of the early Industrial Revolution. He loved nocturnes and dramatic candlelit scenes, and he’s been called “the first professional painter to express the spirit of the Industrial Revolution.” Wright also painted one of the first visual records of round-the-clock manufacturing with Arkwright’s Cotton Mills by Night, above. Sir Richard Arkwright, the owner, was Wright’s friend and patron.
Arkwright’s Cotton Mills by Day, date unknown, Joseph Wright of Derby, courtesy Derby Museum and Art Gallery
Arkwright is credited with developing the modern factory system, combining a power source, machinery, semi-skilled labor and cotton fiber to create mass-produced yarn. He started life as the son of a tailor. Unable to go to school, Arkwright learned to read and write from a cousin. He was apprenticed and then set up shop as a barber and wigmaker in the early 1760s. There he invented a waterproof dye for the trendy periwigs of the time. The income from this would fund his industrial expansion.
Arkwright helped develop carding and spinning machinery (the next phase after the early spinning jenny), but it was his development of 24-hour factory mills that made him rich.
Willersley Castle, date unknown, by Joseph Wright of Derby, courtesy Derby Museum and Art Gallery. This is the home that Sir William Arkwright built on his manufacturing success.
As his mills expanded, it became apparent that the local community couldn’t provide enough labor. Arkwright brought in workers and built them cottages and a public house. Work was organized in two 13-hour shifts per day. The factory gates closed precisely an hour after the first bell was rung. Latecomers were shut out and lost a day’s wages. Whole families were employed, including children as young as seven. Employees received a week’s vacation a year, provided that they didn’t leave town. Arkwright made a fortune and received a knighthood for developing this system, which, ironically, destroyed the same social fluidity that enabled him to escape poverty.
The Bridge Nocturne aka Nocturne Queensboro Bridge, 1910, J. Alden Weir, courtesy Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. It’s beautiful, but is it healthy?
The Industrial Revolution was the root of our modern insomnia, claims Jonathan Crary in 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Before then, the midnight oil (literally) was an indulgence of the upper classes. Then came gaslight and Mr. Arkwright’s 24-hour mill, and out went regular sleep.
Like many American families, we’ve invited the 24-hour mill into our cottage. There is a bank of monitors in my husband’s office, because he’s a telecommuter. He’s often there at 10 PM finishing up work.
Winter, Midnight, 1894, Childe Hassam, courtesy Columbus Museum of Art
It’s not just work that murders sleep. Netflix’ CEO Reed Hastings famously said that sleep is the company’s biggest competitor. “You know, think about it, when you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night.
“We’re competing with sleep, on the margin. And so, it’s a very large pool of time.”
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Nocturnes, fear and longing

Now the outsider is us, alone in the dark, excluded from whatever is going on in that beautiful spot of light.

Nocturne in Grey and Gold: Chelsea Snow, 1896, James McNeill Whistler, courtesy Fogg Art Museum

Last week my husband was studying a beautiful nocturne by the Taos painter Oscar E. Berninghaus. The dim light is a soft greenish-blue, and he wondered why. Berninghaus didn’t have the advantage of ‘knowing’ what the night sky looks like through color photography. That gave him the liberty to paint what he felt and saw.

The human eye can’t make the adjustment between gloom and brilliance very fast. Because of this, modern photography and lighting have changed how we paint nocturnes, as I wrote here. The change is technological but it also reflects our changing worldview. Nocturnes are about fear and longing as much as they are about design.
Nocturne: Blue and Silver: Chelsea, 1871, James McNeill Whistler, courtesy Tate Museum
Night-painting evolved into its own discipline in the 19thcentury, about the same time as the first gas lights were invented. This corresponds to the Industrial Revolution and urbanization in Europe and America. Suddenly, people were out of their beds and working and playing until all hours.
James McNeill Whistler, more than anyone else, made the nocturne an important subject for painting. His nocturnes are reticent, diffuse and spare. They resolutely refuse to tell any stories. “I care nothing for the past, present, or future of the black figure, placed there because the black was wanted at that spot,” he said of Nocturne in Grey and Gold: Chelsea Snow.
Whistler is credited for ushering in modern art with these nocturnes. “By using the word ‘nocturne’ I wished to indicate an artistic interest alone, divesting the picture of any outside anecdotal interest which might have been otherwise attached to it. A nocturne is an arrangement of line, form and colour first,” he wrote.
Apache Scouts Listening, 1908, Frederic Remington, courtesy National Gallery of Art
His peer in nocturne painting was Frederic Remington. He didn’t particularly like Whistler’s arty-farty attitude to painting, or his nocturnes. “Whistler’s talk was light as air and the bottom of a cook stove was like his painting,” he wrote in his diary. Remington, trained as an illustrator, was primarily a storyteller.
He painted his nocturnes late in his short life, as he tried to find a transitional path between illustration and fine painting. The dark, wavering light of night provided a relief from excessive observation. “Cut down and out—do your hardest work outside the picture and let your audience take away something to think about—to imagine,” he wrote in 1903.
The End of the Day, c.1904, Frederic Remington, courtesy Frederic Remington Art Museum
What was ‘outside the picture’ was often the most important element. Consider Apache Scouts Listening (1908). There’s a fantastic diagonal composition that draws us to the wavering black tree line in the distance. Shadows are cast by unseen trees in the foreground. The crouching scouts listen to some sound we can’t hear, as does the trooper. Even the horses are on edge.
Whistler and Remington had even less photographic color reference than did Berninghaus. That’s why their night skies are so fascinating—they could be any color or texture. The contrast is low, and the unlit night sky is brighter and more varied than we see today.
Rooms for Tourists, 1945, Edward Hopper, courtesy Yale University
Set their nocturnes against those of later artists like Edward Hopper or contemporary painter Linden Frederick. Their skies are inky blue or black, thrown into utter darkness by the ever-present electric lights.
Likewise, the narrative has been completely set on its head. Now, what’s ‘outside the picture’ is us. We’re alone in the dark, excluded from whatever human activity is going on inside.