Günter Dinhobl (Hrsg.): Sonderband 7. Eisenbahn/Kultur – Railway/Culture (2004)
II. Die Wahrnehmungen von Raum / The perceptions of space - Jill Murdoch: The Railway in Arcadia: An Approach to Modernity in British Visual Culture
Jill Murdoch every civilisation has its specific Zeitgeist, an aspect of the universal spirit objectified in a defined time and place. A self-motivating principle that variously reveals itself through both ideas and objects.' For Hegel art, religion and philosophy embody the critical aspects of the spirit and ‘an artist (or artisan) of necessity makes his or her work conform to an essential “idea” or spirit of the age’."1 If we take a cross-section through the early railway age we should, therefore, be able to identify its essential spirit in most, if not all, major aspects of culture. The entrepreneurial vigour and engineering enthusiasm of the age should be visible, beyond their concrete reality, in developments in religion, philosophy and art. I will not deal here with the first two, although I would suggest that the Zeitgeist of the nineteenth century can be discerned in contemporary developments. In fine art, however, it is hard to locate what one might expect of the contemporary spirit of the age, even though the work of visual artists should ‘of necessity' conform to the assumed spirit of the age. Was Hegel wrong? Or is the spirit of the age more complex? Is there more than one competing Zeitgeist at any one time? Can silence be a form of its expression? This paper tries to draw some conclusions by looking at the articulation between developments in landscape art and the railway’s entry into the constructed Arcadia of Britain’s nineteenth century landscape. Examples are often given of the railway’s dramatic impact on so many aspects of life, but less common, despite being one of the early railway’s primary impacts, is a concern with its effect on the landscape. English landscape had gone through more than a hundred years of being modelled and remodelled to produce an ‘ideal’ expression of English landscape which was believed to describe Englishness itself. A number of British and American writers recently have examined the ideological meaning of landscape and of its representation in landscape art of the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth century." These studies reveal issues of identity, changing class relations and an ambivalent response to modernity. I will suggest that it was the meaning as- 9 9 Holly, Michael Ann: Panofski and the Foundations of Art History. New York 1984, p. 28. Holly: Panofski and the Foundations of Art History, p. 29. " See, for example: Barrell, John: Dark Side of the Landscape: the Rural Poor in English Painting 1730-1840. Cambridge, 1983; Barrell, John: 'Public Prospect and Private View'. In: Reading Landscape: country-city-capital, ed. by : Simon Pugh. Manchester 1990; Bermingham, Ann: Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition 1740-1860. Berkeley, CA 1986; Daniels, Stephen: Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States. Cambridge, 1993; Barringer, Timothy: Representations of Labour in British Visual C ulture 1850 1875 (unpublished PhD thesis). Sussex 1994; Arscott, Caroline: Modem Life Subjects in British Painting 1840 I 860 (unpublished PhD thesis). Leeds 1987 116
