James Nasmyth (1808-1890) is remembered as the man who invented the steam hammer. This is understandable. His machines could strike iron with terrifying force, drive piles into the ground and transform the capabilities of Victorian engineering.

But there is another Nasmyth, almost concealed behind the furnaces and machinery: the man who drew constantly, painted landscapes and strange imaginary interiors, studied light and shadow, experimented with photography and eventually turned his artist’s eye upon the surface of the Moon.

Robert Adamson, David Octavius Hill, Portrait Of James Nasmyth (c. 1844)

Nasmyth was born in Edinburgh in 1808 into one of the most remarkable artistic families in Scotland. His father, Alexander Nasmyth, was an eminent landscape painter, teacher, architect and designer, later remembered by David Wilkie as a founder of the Scottish school of landscape painting. His elder brother Patrick became a successful professional landscape painter in London, while his sisters were trained to paint and draw and eventually exhibited their own work.

The Nasmyth household therefore seems less like an ordinary family home than an informal academy. Artists and scientists came through the door. Brushes, pencils, tools and models were everywhere. Alexander might be painting, modelling a tree, discussing architecture or retreating to his workshop. James remembered evenings when the children continued with their work while painters, engineers and scientists sat around the fire exchanging ideas.

The important point is that art and engineering were never presented to him as opposites. His father was both painter and mechanic. James grew up believing that the hand which could draw accurately should also be capable of making accurately.

Learning To See

Alexander taught his youngest son drawing in an unusually practical manner. James recalled:

“He taught me to sketch with exactness every object, whether natural or artificial, so as to enable the hand to accurately reproduce what the eye had seen. In order to acquire this almost invaluable art, which can serve so many valuable purposes in life, he was careful to educate my eye, so that I might perceive the relative proportions of the objects placed before me.”

His father might simply throw bricks or pieces of wood down at random and ask him to draw them - their outlines, proportions, lights and shadows. It sounds almost comically modest as an artistic education. No Apollo Belvedere. No heroic nudes. A few bricks on the floor.

But the principle governed Nasmyth's entire life. Look properly. Understand what you are looking at. Then describe it clearly.

He later explained:

“My father was an enthusiast in praise of this graphic language, and I have followed his example. In fact, it formed a principal part of my own education. It gave me the power of recording observations with a few graphic strokes of the pencil, which far surpassed in expression any number of mere words.”

For Nasmyth, drawing was not principally decoration. It was thought made visible. It worked equally well for “mechanical construction”, architecture or “the characteristic features of a wide-stretching landscape”.

Samuel Smiles later condensed the idea beautifully in his introduction to Nasmyth's autobiography:

“Drawing is… the Education of the Eye. It is more interesting than words. It is graphic language.”

That sentence may be the key to understanding Nasmyth as an artist. He did not have an engineering brain on weekdays and an artistic brain on Sundays.

Father, Brother And Son

The contrast within the family is revealing. Alexander Nasmyth was a professional artist. He had trained seriously, worked for Allan Ramsay, painted portraits for money and eventually turned to landscape painting. James remembered him as an “all-round man”: painter, architect and mechanic, with a mind and hands that were perpetually occupied. Yet painting remained Alexander's profession. 

Patrick went further still in that direction. 21 years older than James, he effectively gave himself over to landscape.

James wrote that:

“He was so earnest in his devotion to the study of landscape that in some respects he neglected the ordinary routine of school education… after that his school was the fields, in the face of Nature.”

Patrick studied plants, trees and clouds with obsessive attention. Above all, James remembered his fascination with the sky: the “resting cloud, the driving cloud, and the rain cloud”.

He became a proper working artist. He exhibited, accepted commissions and dealt - not always successfully - with the commercial art market. Dealers appeared at his studio with guineas and bought pictures before they were finished. Patrick, apparently gloriously hopeless with money, would point to his piles of drawings and declare:

“There’s lots of money in these banks to draw from.”

His days were spent at the easel or walking into the countryside to refill the sketchbook.

James chose another road. He possessed much of the same ability, but he never appears to have needed painting to pay the rent. Engineering became the profession; art became something simultaneously more private and more pervasive. It went everywhere with him.

Drawing As Memory

Nasmyth's understanding of sketching was unusually emotional. He believed that drawings could preserve experience in a way language could not. Writing about the family sketchbooks, he said:

“Each sketch, however slight, strikes the keynote, as it were, to many happy recollections of the circumstances, and the persons who were present at the time it was made.”

And then:

“Written words may be forgotten, but these slight pencil recollections imprint themselves on the mind with a force that can never be effaced. Everything that occurred at the time rises up as fresh in the memory as if hours and not years had passed since then.”

For him, drawing stored experience. It was “the means of storing up ideas, and not mere words”.

That explains the enormous breadth of his subjects. He drew buildings while travelling. He recorded machinery. He drew landscapes. He sketched geology. He drew what he saw through telescopes. And sometimes he simply invented entire worlds.

This is where the engineer becomes wonderfully strange.

The Engineer Lets His Imagination Out

During the years when Bridgewater Foundry was roaring away with what he described as the “whirr of the self-acting tools, and the sound of the steam hammers”, Nasmyth went home and drew.

James Nasmyth - Landscape - Royal Scottish Academy

His own description is delightful:

“Drawing was as familiar to me as language. Indeed, it was often my method of speaking. It has always been the way in which I have illustrated my thoughts.”

He made drawings on his travels, but also what he called fancy subjects:

“Now and then I drew upon my fancy, and with pen and ink I conjured up ‘The Castle of Udolpho,’ ‘A Bit of Old England,’ ‘The Fairies are Out,’ and ‘Everybody for Ever.’”

Others included The Alchemist, Old Mortality, Robinson Crusoe and Gathering Sticks. He had some printed privately and gave them to friends.

Washington Irving received a group of these drawings and thanked him for his “exquisite fancy sketches”, while Viscount Duncan marvelled that: “the same hand and head that executed them invented the steam hammer, and many other gigantic pieces of machinery” - which is really the whole Nasmyth problem in a sentence.

How does the hand that designs one of the most formidable machines of the Industrial Revolution also draw fairies?

Nasmyth would probably have regarded the question as unnecessary. Both required observation, imagination and control of the hand.

The Moon

For years Nasmyth studied its surface through telescopes, drawing craters, ridges and shadows. But observation alone wasn't enough. He wanted to imagine the experience of standing there.

He wrote:

“While earnestly studying the details of the moon’s surface, it was a source of great additional interest to me to endeavour to realise in the mind’s eye the possible landscape effect of its marvellous elevations and depressions. Here my artistic faculty came into operation.”

That phrase is extraordinary: “Here my artistic faculty came into operation.”

He began treating lunar geology as landscape painting - asking how brilliant sunlight, absolute shadow and the absence of atmosphere would alter what a viewer might perceive.

This is quintessential Nasmyth. Observation becomes drawing. Drawing becomes understanding. Understanding stimulates imagination. Imagination suggests an experiment. The experiment produces another image.

He later built models of lunar surfaces and photographed them so convincingly that generations of viewers assumed they were telescopic photographs of the Moon itself. Painting, drawing, modelling, photography, geology, astronomy and engineering had collapsed into one method.

He Never Really Retired

Nasmyth retired from engineering at 48, wealthy enough to do more or less whatever he pleased. David Roberts wrote to congratulate him, knowing his love of art, and referred wonderfully to Nasmyth's lunar researches as: “‘The Landscape of other worlds’ you alone have sketched for us”, before suggesting that perhaps photography might provide the next step. It did.

At Hammerfield, his home near Penshurst in Kent, Nasmyth pursued astronomy, photography, drawing, painting, gardening, tool-making and whatever else happened to catch his attention. The word “retirement” seems almost ridiculous. He had merely removed the commercial necessity from his curiosity. And perhaps that tells us why his painting career looks unusual.

Alexander Nasmyth painted because he was a painter. Patrick Nasmyth painted because he was a painter. James Nasmyth painted because he needed to see.

Sometimes the thing requiring understanding was a tree. Sometimes a medieval interior. Sometimes an alchemist. Sometimes a steam hammer. Sometimes the Moon.

The Nasmyth Mind

There is an enchanting photograph late in his life showing the back of his hand, reproduced to demonstrate a theory about mountain formation. Naturally.

Most people look at an ageing hand and see wrinkles. Nasmyth looked at his and saw geology.

The shrinking interior of the Earth, he reasoned, might force its surface into mountain ranges rather as the skin of the hand folds and wrinkles. So the engineer-photographer-artist turned his own hand into an explanatory landscape.

He spent his whole life making connections of this kind.

A pile of bricks could teach you to draw York Minster.
A drawing could explain a machine.
A machine could make a telescope.
A telescope could reveal a mountain.
A mountain could become a picture.
And the wrinkles of an old man's hand could explain the Earth.

James Nasmyth invented machines in order to make things. He drew and painted in order to understand them.