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
Art and Industry While enthusiasm as well as responsibility for the development of railways was, to some extent, shared in Britain by the aristocracy, the primary entrepreneurial energy came from the merchants and industrialists who made up the ‘middling sort’. Such people had often become small landowners themselves and they began to develop an interest in collecting art works, often becoming patrons and beginning to displace the traditional connoisseurs from this role. The opening of many private art galleries in London and provincial towns from the late eighteenth century onwards facilitated this interest. Art had reflected the concerns and realities of the traditional art patrons up to the beginning of the eighteenth century (the church and later the aristocracy) and one might have expected the new patrons to wish to see their own realities reflected in the art that they commissioned or purchased. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, industrial landscape paintings were popular. Artists responded to the new market with experiments in both pictorial form and subject matter: a prominent example of this is Joseph Wright of Derby. His view of Arkwright's Mil1 at Cromford, painted in 1783, shows the factory blending harmoniously into the natural landscape while its many lit windows challenge the power of the light of the moon. John Sell Cotman, in 1802, gave a different view of an industrial landscape in Bedlam Furnace near Madeley in which the industry is seen to dominate the landscape and to have blighted nature. J.M.W. Turner’s Limekiln at Coal- brookdale (1797) and Philip de Loutherbourg’s Coalbrookdale by Night (1801) are perhaps two of the better known paintings that made use of a particular landscape discourse - the sublime, in which the beauty of a scene is appreciated through fear or awe of its power or grandeur - for the depiction of industrial landscapes.1* * The Railway in Arcadia: an approach to modernity in British visual culture '* The sublime was an aesthetic philosophy expounded by Burke in his Philosophical Enquire. See also Briggs, Asa: Iron Bridge to Crystal Palace: Impact and Images of the Industrial Revolution. London 1979, especially Chapter 1, for a discussion of the use of the picturesque in industrial landscapes 119
