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 The fifth, and possibly the most compelling piece of evidence that stands against Klingender’s simplistic view of why the English so thoroughly turned their back on the railway in fine art - evidence that needs to be developed far more than can be done here - comes from a comparison with what was happening in American art in the 1830s and 1840s. The pastoral landscape had a different meaning in American Romanticism than it had in English Romanticism, and the way its meaning articulated with the development of technology, notions of progress and a radically different class and political structure of society, led to a different set of tensions. As a result, it did prove to be possible for artists to insert the railway in paintings of the landscape, and the discourse of landscape art was explicitly used to develop the debate on technology. One of several American artists who made statements by means of direct reference to the railway, rather than by excluding it, was Thomas Cole. He often painted paired subjects and in a pair of paintings of the same view in the Catskills in New York State, six years apart, he shows the effect of the construction of the railway line through the valley. The paintings are View of the Catskill, Early Autumn from 1837 and River in the Catskills from 1843. In both the scene is approached from the traditional slightly raised viewpoint. The first shows a lush and picturesque landscape framed in trees. The second has a minuscule train in the distance, identified by its gentle curl of smoke - reminiscent of Carmichael’s harmonious insertion of railways in his engravings ten years earlier - but the absence of trees in the foreground leaves us in no doubt as to the magnitude of the change that has taken place. Leo Marx comments that, precisely through his use of pastoral landscape conventions, Cole makes no secret of the fact that he is criticising the presence of the railway but his American patrons would be happy with his simultaneous ‘reconciliation of the new machine power with the natural order’ as elaborated the following year by Ralph Waldo Emerson in an aesthetic that saw art as a ‘virtual means of resolving the specific opposition between technology and nature’.51 From this different artistic tradition two things can be learnt: first, patrons of art in the United States liked to see technology attractively presented in paintings and second, where fear existed that the railway spelled the death knell of the pastoral, it was possible to mount a critique of technology within a landscape style that does not offend the genre. A very different class identity was supported by the dominant ideology, along with a very different set of class relations - a site of struggle that had yet to be resolved in Britain. 128 Marx, Leo: Does Pastoralism have a Future? In: The Pastoral Landscape, ed. by John Dixon Hunt. Washington 1992, p. 218.
