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
Bridge of Ballochmyle as a gift for William Maxwell Alexander, The Laird of Bal- lochmyle Estate, on whose land it stood. In 1842 Joseph Treffry, an ambitious railway pioneer in Cornwall, built a massive granite viaduct as part of a railway line to take trains from his granite and china clay mines to the docks a few miles away. He knew that he was building the viaduct ‘for posterity’ and he had the occasion commemorated in an oil painting, the Luxulyan Viaduct, by Robert Whale who went on to be influential in the landscape art movement in Canada. Thomas Miles Richardson painted Excavations for the Railway in Newcastle in 1848 which hung in Robert Stephenson’s collection until he died. A better known example is Iron and Coal painted by William Bell Scott, at the time an important member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, for Sir Walter and Lady Pauline Trevelyan, very prominent members of the northern gentry and great art collectors. Iron and Coal depicts any and every aspect of modernity with a connection to the north east of England, with a focus on Stephenson’s workshop (where Rocket was made), and his High Level Bridge over the River Tyne. All of these paintings still hang in the family homes where they began life and where they were clearly proud possessions of the original owners. Apart from Iron and Coal none, as far as 1 know - and this is the point - has ever been exhibited. They remained as private pleasures. It is possible that there are a lot more pictures in this category. These are just the ones that I have been able to discover and they stand as evidence that by no means everyone was reluctant to have reminders of the technological revolution around them in their own homes. So was it the railway’s early contemporaries who feared modernity or might the record of such paintings be so limited as the result of a late twentieth century selectivity in art history? The answer to that question lies outside the remit of this paper. The Railway in Arcadia: an approach to modernity in British visual culture Illustration 5: The Luxulyan Viaduct by Robert Whale, 1842, oil on canvas. 127
