November 2008

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Inevitably, ‘The Railway: Art in the Age of Steam’ begins with Rain, Steam, and Speed, Turner’s hymn to the genius of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Not, unfortunately, the original painting, now adjudged too fragile to travel. But the little film shown on a screen at the exhibition’s entrance comes with the advantage, in terms of dramatic effect at least, of being able to move in and out from a close-up of the train itself to a long-shot of the whole composition, demonstrating how Turner sees the railway as all-of-a-piece with the landscape it strides through, the weather which bathes and batters it.

That, of course, is the Romantic view, and so announces the theme of the whole exhibition. In our post-modern age Romanticism is seen largely as dominated by the arcadian and pastoral: ever since the revival of interest in the likes of Blake and Palmer in the 1920s, the natural reaction to any sign of industry in Britain has been to deprecate it as anti-aesthetic and intrusive.

Within the exhibition, we are invited to witness the rapid transition in art from a primarily documentary approach to railways and their works at the outset, through the thrill of the new that actuated Turner, to calm acceptance of them as a routine part of the landscape. That was essentially the Impressionist attitude, which remained unchallenged until World War I, when Marinetti weighed in with his praise of the machine per se as an emblem of modernism, and the new Romanticism rejoiced in pylons marching ruthlessly across the landscape, while the old Romanticism wailed ‘Thus far and no further’ – or, indeed, time to pull back and return to Arcadia.

The first surprise of the show is to observe how calm and objective the earliest depictions are – presumably because, while the horses in David Cox’s The Night Train (1849) are unmistakably alarmed, for the topographical artists and printmakers of the period the railways were just one more manifestation of the new industrial spirit, and any level-headed Briton could and did take them in his stride. Novelists probably did not fall into the category of the level-headed: Wilkie Collins for one fully appreciated the dramatic usefulness of rail crashes for disposing of unwanted characters. Painters responded to the seething humanity of a London railway station, or imagined a carriage as a likely locale for a romantic encounter.

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