54-513: 53°29′50″N 1°26′03″W / 53.4973007°N 1.4341879°W / 53.4973007; -1.4341879 The Milton Ironworks was an iron works established in the 19th century in the Elsecar area of Barnsley , West Yorkshire , England. Elsecar , near Barnsley , South Yorkshire , England was, until the 18th century, a mainly agricultural village on the estate of Earl Fitzwilliam . Coal and Iron had been worked from small pits around
108-412: A bandstand , children's playground, a cafe, and a pitch and putt golf course . The reservoir, now a local nature reserve , is adjacent to the upper park. The landscape and valley have extensive archaeological remains, but many are on private land or in dangerous locations. It is recommended that all visitors keep to public rights of way or take organised tours. Whistlejacket Whistlejacket
162-408: A lion perched on its back, the painting is an early intimation of Romanticism , as well as a challenge to the lowly place animal painting occupied in the hierarchy of genres . To a greater degree than any earlier painter, Stubbs produced genuinely individual portraits of specific horses, paying intimate attention to details of their form. Minute blemishes, veins, and the muscles flexing just below
216-604: A major project was completed to rescue and conserve the engine, supported by Barnsley Council, the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Historic England. It now runs on hydraulics with regular open days from Easter to October each year when visitors can also look down the New Colliery mineshafts. John and William Darwin & Co. of Sheffield opened the first furnace at Elsecar Ironworks (at the bottom of Forge Lane) in 1795. In 1799 another ironworks
270-421: A pair of much smaller paintings of groups of standing horses, one including Whistlejacket, in a horizontal format "like a classical frieze" with a similar honey beige background broken only by small shadows at the feet. It would seem likely that leaving the portraits without the usual landscape background was Rockingham's idea. Stubbs depicts Whistlejacket rising to a levade , but with his head turned towards
324-475: A scattering of shallow coal pits, in a valley alongside an ancient stream. Elsecar's development from the late 18th century can be seen as a microcosm of the whole Industrial Revolution in Britain. The village was nothing more than a series of farms until the 18th century. Although coal had been mined in the area since the 14th century, the first major colliery, Elsecar Old, was not sunk until 1750. It
378-551: A similarly sized equestrian portrait of George II by David Morier , but Rockingham then changed his mind. According to Horace Walpole, on a visit to Wentworth where he was probably shown round by the housekeeper, the painting was intended as a gift for the King, but Rockingham supposedly had not bothered to support progress of the painting after falling out of favour, and ordered it hung at Wentworth Woodhouse uncompleted instead. Another reason popularly given for it being "unfinished"
432-505: A slump in the early 1880s and the Milton Ironworks closed in 1884. The most obvious clue to the site of the works is the local pub, named "The Furnace". Looking out from the pub there is a large area of flat land, now a playing field, which was covered by the works. The tramways to the canal basin can easily be traced, both on the ground and from aerial photographs and maps. Most of these are, nowadays, footpaths and bridleways and
486-453: A story in the biography of Stubbs by his friend and fellow-painter Ozias Humphrey , when the portrait was nearly finished Whistlejacket was accidentally led in front of it by a stable boy and reacted violently, treating it as a rival stallion, and lifting the boy holding him fully off the ground in his attempts to attack the painting. The story probably originated with Stubbs himself, but is probably too good to be true; it clearly recalls Pliny
540-594: Is an oil-on-canvas painting from about 1762 by the British artist George Stubbs showing the Marquess of Rockingham 's racehorse approximately at life-size, rearing up against a plain background. The canvas is large, lacks any other content except some discreet shadows, and Stubbs has paid precise attention to the details of the horse's appearance. It has been described in The Independent as "a paradigm of
594-411: Is in "very good condition" and was " lined , cleaned and restored a few years before its acquisition." One story was that Rockingham had intended to commission an equestrian portrait of George III ; Stubbs would paint the horse while two other notable portrait and landscape painters would fill in the king and the landscape respectively. In one account, The painting was supposedly intended to accompany
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#1732800818099648-631: Is near to Jump and Wentworth , it is also 2 miles (3.2 km) south of Hoyland , 6 miles (9.7 km) south of Barnsley and 8 miles (13 km) north-east of Sheffield . Elsecar falls within the Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Ward of Hoyland Milton. Elsecar is unique as a name. It is thought to derive from the Old English personal name of Aelfsige (mentioned in Cartulary of Nostell Priory , 1259–66) and
702-399: Is that Rockingham was so impressed by Whistlejacket's furious reaction when confronted by Stubbs working on the painting in his stable, that he ordered it hung without further decoration. Stubbs produced other paintings of horses against blank backgrounds for Rockingham, nothing in the painting indicates that it is not complete, and the detail of the shadows cast by Whistlejacket's rear legs on
756-608: The Old Norse word kjarr , denoting a marsh or brushwood. From the late 18th century, Elsecar was transformed into an 'industrial estate village' for nearby Wentworth Woodhouse , with multiple collieries and two major ironworks. It is seen as one of the UK's first model villages and a precursor to Saltaire. A 1795 Newcomen steam engine at the Elsecar New Colliery is the oldest steam engine still in situ, anywhere in
810-633: The Tate Gallery 1984–85, and the National Gallery from 1996 before its purchase the next year. It is now displayed in the centre of room 34, and is framed by doorways at the end of a long enfilade so that it can be seen through ten intervening rooms from the Sainsbury Wing, at the other end of the gallery. It is consistently among the top ten most popular National Gallery paintings in various forms of reproduction. The painting
864-487: The 1880s. The Milton Ironworks was on the site of what is now the Forge Playing Field. Remains include what's left of the blast wall, a bank running across the field, and furnace ponds by The Furnace pub. The Elsecar ironworks is once of the best surviving industrial complexes from the mid-19th century. After the ironworks was closed in the 1880s, its buildings were integrated into the colliery workshops and
918-560: The Elder 's famous story of Zeuxis and Parrhasius . When Wentworth was remodelled under a later Earl Fitzwilliam , a 40-foot square "Whistlejacket Room" was created to showcase the painting, with only single family portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Sir Thomas Lawrence to keep it company. Wentworth Woodhouse ceased to be occupied by the family after World War II, and the painting was loaned to Kenwood House in London from 1971 to 1981,
972-509: The Marquess of Rockingham. He famously won a four-mile race at York in August 1759 against a strong field, beating Brutus by a length, and then retired to stud, being ten years old. He was beaten only four times in his racing career, but was notoriously temperamental and difficult to manage. He was "averagely successful at stud", and must have died before Rockingham's death in 1782, as he
1026-552: The UK and further afield. Now a Scheduled Ancient Monument, the Elsecar Newcomen is understood to be the oldest steam engine in the world still in situ where it was originally built. The engine pumped water from the colliery workings from 1795 to 1923. In 1928, Henry Ford visited Elsecar and tried to purchase the engine to take it back to his new museum in America. His request was refused by Earl Fitzwilliam. In 2014,
1080-700: The Wentworth Woodhouse estate. In the second half of the 19th century, both ironworks were leased and operated together by famous ironmakers the Dawes Brothers, originally from West Bromwich. In 1838 a horse-drawn tramroad was constructed to link the Dearne and Dove Canal with the Milton Ironworks, Tankersley Park ironstone mines, Lidgett Colliery and the Thorncliffe Ironworks at Chapeltown . Stationary engines were used for
1134-643: The animal's physiology. He suspended the cadavers with block and tackle to better able sketch them in different positions. The careful notes and drawings he made during his studies were published in 1766 in The Anatomy of the Horse . Even before the publication of his book, Stubbs's dedication to his subject reaped him rewards: his drawings were recognized as more accurate than the work of other equine artists and commissions from aristocratic patrons quickly followed. Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham
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#17328008180991188-589: The building of two ironworks and associated housing designed by architect John Carr of York . As a result, Elsecar is now recognised to be one of the first model villages in the UK and a precursor to historic places such as Saltaire. The subsequent development and expansion of the village continued to be closely overseen by the Fitzwilliam dynasty. Uniquely in Europe, Elsecar is understood to have been an 'industrial estate village', built and operated in addition to
1242-443: The commission to paint Whistlejacket ", though some indication of the likely price comes from a receipt by Stubbs dated 30 December 1762 for "Eighty Guineas for one Picture of a Lion and another of a Horse Large as Life", probably a different picture for Rockingham's London house. Earlier in 1762, Stubbs had painted a second portrait of Whistlejacket, with two other unnamed stallions and a groom, Joshua or Simon Cobb. According to
1296-525: The direction of revised planning guidance". To inform this, there was an extensive programme of historical research, archaeology, architectural investigation and community involvement. Of particular note, two major community digs, planned and carried out involving dozens of volunteers, took place on the Milton Ironworks and the New Colliery boiler house. In 2017 Caesium magnetometer , Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) and Earth Resistance Tomography (ERT) surveys were conducted at Elsecar to attempt to determine
1350-529: The extensive buildings of the New Yard workshops and Elsecar Ironworks. In 1910 a local amateur photographer, Herbert Parkin, took photographs of families paddling in the local reservoir and sent them into the Sheffield Star with the caption Elsecar-by-the-Sea. The name caught on and with the help of a good transport link from Sheffield via the local railway station , a thriving tourism business
1404-540: The family's traditional aristocratic estate village of Wentworth. Additions to the village instructed by the Earls in the mid 19th century included rows of miners and ironworkers' cottages, a miners lodging house, church, indoor market, coaching inn, school, cricket club and architecturally impressive workshops, known as the New Yard. A private railway station for the Earl, including a waiting room for privileged and Royal guests,
1458-402: The first time. Newcomen's genius was to use the force of atmospheric pressure acting on a piston at the top of a steam-filled cylinder, into which water had been injected to create a vacuum, to move the piston and a beam attached to it. James Watt made the steam engine far more efficient half a century later, but by that time Newcomen engines were widely established and powering industry across
1512-701: The flawless beauty of an Arabian thoroughbred". The Fitzwilliam family , heirs of the childless Rockingham, retained the painting until 1997 when funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund allowed the National Gallery , London to acquire it for £11 million. Stubbs was a specialist equine artist who in 1762 was invited by Rockingham to spend "some months" at Wentworth Woodhouse in Yorkshire , his main country house. Stubbs had painted many horse portraits, with and without human figures, but
1566-579: The following years, Elsecar New Colliery was expanded and the original Elsecar (Old) Colliery modernised. In the 1840s and 1850s, two state-of-the-art collieries were sunk, Simon Wood and Elsecar Low (later renamed Hemingfield). The latter survives, has been rescued and is now in community ownership. In 1851, Queen Victoria was taken outside the Great Exhibition , to see a column of Barnsley Seam coal which had been somehow mined intact by Elsecar miners and taken to London. The last colliery to open
1620-545: The former New Yard colliery workshops. Operated by Barnsley Museums, it has independent shops, studios, galleries, cafes and a large antiques centre. A visitor centre and regular tours share the unique history of the village, and includes a highly detailed digital reconstruction of the village and valley as it was in the 1880. The former rolling mill of the Elsecar Ironworks is now a major event space, with standing capacity of up to 1000 people. Elsecar Park has
1674-520: The ground suggest that this is how Stubbs intended the picture to be seen. Whistlejacket was a chestnut stallion , with flaxen -coloured mane and tail, believed to be the original colouring of the wild Arabian breed. He was a Thoroughbred race horse foaled in 1749 at the stud of Sir William Middleton, 3rd Baronet at Belsay Castle in Northumberland, and named after a contemporary cold remedy containing gin and treacle . His sire
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1728-437: The heroic scale and lack of background of Whistlejacket are "unprecedented" in his work and equine portraits in general and "contemporaries were so astonished that a single horse should command a huge canvas that legends quickly developed" explaining why the painting was unfinished, none of which seem plausible or supported by the evidence to modern art historians. In fact Stubbs's earliest canvases on his visit in 1762 included
1782-578: The incline sections, and remained in operation until about 1880. The two Elsecar Ironworks are credited with a variety of major achievements, including making iron for John Rennie's bridge over the Thames at Southwark which opened in 1819, bridges designed for the Isle de Bourbon (now Reunion) by Marc Isambard Brunel , the steam engine at Leawood on the Cromford Canal, iron with which armour plate
1836-483: The industrial canal and reservoir, canal basins, early-Victorian railway, clinker-reinforced trackways, lime kiln sites, coking furnaces and much else. Built heritage that survives in the village is similarly extensive, including miners and ironworkers housing, historic pubs, cricket club, parsonage, vicarage, toll house, miners lodging house, the Milton Hall exhibition hall, the church, steam mill, two schools, and
1890-643: The ironworks largely forgotten until very recently. A Scheduled Ancient Monument as of 2018, the casting shed, rolling mill, workshop, entrance arch and offices have survived intact. The impressive blast wall, blowing engine house, waggon ways, ironworks reservoir and charging plateau have survived in ruinous form and plans are being made for their future conservation. The landscape around the village has extensive archaeological remains and historic sites, which can be explored on organised guided tours. They include ironworks ruins and ponds, furnace charging plateau, collieries, bell pits, footrills, mineshafts, waggon ways,
1944-482: The location of a number of former industrial buildings. A major legacy of the Elsecar Heritage Action Zone was the creation of two new Scheduled Ancient Monuments at Hemingfield Colliery and the Elsecar Ironworks, the extension of the village conservation areas and extensive listings, creating many new Grade II* listed buildings. Elsecar Heritage Centre is a visitor attraction based in
1998-456: The region. The mid-1990s saw the repurposing of the former colliery workshops into a new visitor destination, Elsecar Heritage Centre . During the sinking of the Elsecar New Colliery in 1795, Earl Fitzwilliam had a large atmospheric beam engine installed to pump water from deep underground. It is of the type invented by Thomas Newcomen in 1712. Newcomen invented the world's first practical steam engine, creating mechanical power using steam for
2052-690: The route to the canal basin lies between long establish hedgerows. It is more difficult to trace the tramways to Tankersley Park or the Thornecliffe works, which became the centre of the Newton, Chambers empire, but not impossible. Elsecar Elsecar ( / ˈ ɛ l s ɪ k ɑːr / , locally / ˈ ɛ l s ɪ k ər / ) is a village in the Metropolitan Borough of Barnsley in South Yorkshire , England. It
2106-591: The surface of the skin are all visible and reproduced with great care and realism. Whistlejacket had already retired after a fairly successful racing career, but was painted in this unusual form to show "a supremely beautiful specimen of the pure-bred Arabian horse at its finest". Stubbs's knowledge of equine physiology was unsurpassed by any painter; he had studied anatomy at York and, from 1756, he spent 18 months in Lincolnshire where he carried out dissections and experiments on dead horses to better understand
2160-682: The tramroad system was relaid to standard gauge in the late 1850s and this enabled wagons from the main line company to reach the Milton works and mines in Tankersley Park. The leaseholders of the land were W.H. and George Dawes, the celebrated Dawes Brothers, their name also being linked to the iron and steel industry in the Scunthorpe area, opening that areas first ironworks, the Trent Ironworks, in 1860. The iron trade went into
2214-517: The turf , for there is always a possibility of some sort of pleasure in that; but not the smallest in other sorts". Wentworth House , as it was then known, had been "rebuilt by his father on a huge scale" and empty walls needed filling. Horace Walpole , on the visit in 1766 mentioned below, complained of the un-landscaped park "This lord loves nothing but horses, and the enclosures for them take place of everything". The Wentworth archives, "though unusually comprehensive, contain no clear reference to
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2268-416: The viewer, in a pose comparable to a number of earlier monumental equestrian portraits , including examples by Rubens and Velázquez , but in these the emphasis is on the rider. Here the horse is alone and in a natural state, producing a "romantic study in solitude and liberty". Like many of Stubbs's other paintings of horses and other animals in the wild, including several versions of a horse attacked by
2322-533: The village gala, which takes place in the park each September. In March 2017 Elsecar was designated as one of ten Heritage Action Zones (HAZ) by Historic England with the benefit that the area would receive a share of £6 million. As part of the HAZ project, in 2019 a Historic Area Assessment was developed, "intended to illustrate the varied character and significance of the village and its setting in order to inform interpretation, conservation and development under
2376-409: The village since the late 14th century, particularly in Tankersley Park. The Milton Ironworks was situated atop a hill to the west of the Dearne and Dove Canal and in order to make use of these facilities it was connected by a tramroad, believed to have been laid to a gauge less than Standard Gauge , the rails being laid on stone sleeper blocks. This tramroad dates from around 1840 The main part of
2430-416: The world. The village now attracts over 500,000 visitors each year, to its heritage centre, historic sites and award-winning park. In 1870–72, John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales described Elsecar as having a population of 1912 and 353 dwelling places. The village had developed rapidly since a century before, when it had been just a handful of cottages around a village green and
2484-474: Was Elsecar Main in 1908. King George V went underground there in 1912, for which he received respect and recognition, as news had come through that morning of a terrible disaster at Cadeby Colliery. King George was not the first Royal to go underground in the UK, as he acknowledged during his visit. King William IV, when Duke of Clarence, had been taken into Elsecar Old Colliery in 1828. Elsecar Main Colliery
2538-665: Was Mogul and grandsire was the Godolphin Arabian ; through his dam, he was also descended from the Byerly Turk , and various other Arabians and Turks. He raced from 1752, winning many races in the North. He lost to Jason in the King's Plate at Newmarket in 1755, but won the following year, when he was also narrowly beaten by Spectator for the Jockey Club Plate at Newmarket in 1756. He was sold soon after to
2592-578: Was a Whig politician, later to be twice Prime Minister , and exceptionally rich even by the standards of that wealthy group. In 1762 he commissioned Stubbs to produce a series of portraits of his horses, one of which was Whistlejacket. He was also a collector of art, commissioning several works in Italy on his Grand Tour in the late 1740s, but his great leisure interests were, typically for his class, horseracing and gambling . His wife wrote of her hopes that he would restrict himself to gambling "just upon
2646-412: Was added in 1870 and now serves as a nursery for local children. The Earls oversaw expansion of deep coalmining and sinking of new collieries for over a century and maintained a direct controlling interest in the management of the village's collieries until nationalisation in 1947. In 1794-5, the village's first deep colliery was sunk, a few metres to the east of the village's proposed canal basin. Over
2700-520: Was closed in October 1983. Many Elsecar colliers went to work at Cortonwood, just down the canal towpath, where a few months later the Miners Strike of 1984-5 began. Elsecar Workshops were sold off by British Coal soon after, ending the village's ties to the coal industry. In the following years, the village suffered from severe economic and social problems, as did all the mining villages in
2754-456: Was established. Between the wars, Hoyland Nether Urban District Council created a public park to take advantage of the influx of visitors, on land granted by Earl Fitzwilliam, adding a boating jetty to the reservoir, a pavilion cafe and bandstands. The village flourished as 'the seaside resort at the heart of the Yorkshire coalfield'. Since 2008, the name Elsecar-by-the-Sea has been used for
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#17328008180992808-485: Was founded at Milton, by the Walker Brothers of Rotherham, less than a mile to the west of Elsecar, on a hilltop in full view of the village of Wentworth just across the valley. The Earls maintained a close involvement in the village's two ironworks. Although leased to a series of major ironmasters from their establishment in the 1790s to closure in the 1880s. the ironworks were at times managed direct as part of
2862-619: Was rolled for HMS Warrior and replacement bridges for Sheffield when the city's bridges were destroyed in the Great Sheffield Flood of 1864. Two smaller family-run forges were also established in the mid 19th century and survived well into the 20th century, including the Davey Brothers foundry, whose drain and manhole covers can still be seen across the village. The two main Elsecar ironworks were closed in
2916-458: Was taken on by the Marquis of Rockingham in 1752, later consolidated onto a hilltop to the west of the village and is thought to have been painted by George Stubbs, around the same time he painted Whistle Jacket . The village was transformed from the 1790s at the direction of the 4th Earl Fitzwilliam of Wentworth Woodhouse , with the sinking of its first deep colliery, the cutting of a canal,
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