Drawing tracks

Although some perceived the advent of the locomotive as a threat to the countryside, by allowing artists a quick and easy way to travel, it broadened their choice of painting horizons, discovers Carla Passino

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IN May 1844, a steam locomotive hurtled down Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Maidenhead bridge into the Royal Academy's annual picture show, its plume of steam melding with the sky as it left behind a golden blur of a landscape.

Britain's first public railway, linking the Durham collieries to Darlington and Stockton, had only opened 19 years earlier, but J. M. W. Turner had been quick to see the train's artistic potential. 'The railways have furnished Turner with a new field for the exhibition of his eccentric style,' commented the Lloyds Weekly Newspaper on May 12.

In the years before his Rain, Steam and Speed, trains had primarily been the preserve of prints, often produced by the operators themselves to assuage fears or reduce resistance to the development of new lines. Some of the pictures, particularly those made by architect Thomas Talbot Bury, were an extraordinary commercial success, spawning international editions, but for a time the Victorian public remained wary of the new technology.

For every John Cooke Bourne who relished documenting the feat of engineering that was the construction of tracks—even when it came at the price of slashing through chunks of the landscape, as in his 1839 Tring Cutting—there were others who perceived the advent of the locomotive as a threat, a desecration of the countryside. Thus, frightened horses bolted away from a whizzing convoy in David Cox's 1849 The Night Train and, in 1853, John Martin had a train fall into the depths of Hell in The Last Judgement. Turner himself, who painted his picture at the height of the early 1840s 'railway mania', when the Victorians poured their money into ventures that would, inevitably, collapse a few years later, may have seen the railway as an agent of both destruction and progress.