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
The subscription lists to the published books of lithographs contained gentry as well as many of the business men, railway financiers and land-owners who were becoming influential patrons of fine art. Yet when J.W. Carmichael exhibited his magnificent oil painting Brighton Viaduct on the Brighton, Lewes and Hastings Railway at the Royal Academy summer exhibition in 1848, it was ignored by almost all reviewers and was dismissed in the Art Journal, as being “rather an engineering watercolour subject, than suitable for an oil picture” although they did begrudgingly acknowledge that “it is, however, as agreeably painted as the material will admit.” This now seems somewhat ironic since, in the same exhibition review, several column inches were spent in criticising the members of the Academy for doing “nothing to harmonise with the spirit of the age.”29 It seems, then, that the ‘idle’ were happy to see the railway represented in one format, but not when spending a little more on their drawing-room decorations; it seems to have posed a threat to the conventions of the discourse of fine art in a way that it did not in those works produced for mass consumption. The often very beautiful lithographs are what have generally been taken as evidence for the prolific portrayal of the early decades of the railway in nineteenth century art. The sale of Bury’s prints alone would indicate a great enthusiasm by people to own and display in their homes a representation of this marvellous new invention. Bourne’s prints a few years later outsold even Bury’s. But, while they were very skilful, and then - as now - they were sought-after forms of popular art, the engravings were a marketing ploy commissioned with the express purpose of both advertising the presence of the railway and of allaying fears of the railway’s operation and of its impact on the countryside. Bury’s prints show how easy and safe it was to be around the railway, Carmichael’s make it a non-discordant part of the picturesque vision of landscape and Bourne’s show what a fantastic achievement its construction was. Railway owners and their public relations people made use of the fashionable construct of the landscape to spin a harmonious web around the railway. The Railway in Arcadia: an approach to modernity in British visual culture Art Journal X (June 1st, 1848), pp. 165-168. 125
