November 2008

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But in visual terms it took the genius of a Turner to appreciate to the full the unearthly beauty of the railway in a landscape context. Even at the end of the century Monet in his suite at the Savoy wrote home to his wife: ‘When I got up I was horrified to find there was no fog, not even the faintest trace of a fog…But then, little by little, the fires were lit and the smoke and fog came back.’ Never mind the ecology, see the beauty.

Although no railways are visible in Monet’s London paintings, they are no doubt important contributors to the iridescent smog he delights in, and in any case we know what his attitude to the romance of steam was from his Gare Saint-Lazare paintings, two of which are in the show, and with unparalleled vividness from the unforgettable Anna Karenina image of his Train in the Snow, also present (Fig. 1). Even the more phlegmatic Manet felt a stirring, although in his The Railway (The Gare Saint-Lazare) the steam plays a very subordinate role as a characterful background to the two figures who dominate the foreground. Caillebotte’s On the Pont de l’Europe is closer in attitude to Manet than Monet, but the magic of the railway is still acknowledged by the fact that two of the three figures (male, of course) have their backs to us so that they can gaze at the Gare Saint-Lazare through the vast cast-iron struts of the railway bridge.

Curiously, Pissarro’s two railway images in this show emerge as equally prosaic. Both were painted in England, and both distil the same kind of rather wan suburban poetry that we like to think is typically English. Oddly, while the first dates from 1871, during Pissarro’s early exile in Britain, the second, painted 16 years later, shows little or no change of attitude. But new notions were stirring: artists were beginning to appreciate the sheer modernity of the newest trains, their speed and their sleekness. Explosive works by Boccioni and Severini are just round the corner, and after them the surreal disquiet of De Chirico (Fig. 2) and Delvaux.