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 Railway in Arcadia: an approach to modernity in British visual culture

As more and more land was swallowed up by agricultural production and by the visual regularity of enclosures, people’s enthusiasm for the dominance of 'man over nature’ began to be questioned towards the end of the eighteenth century and there was a ‘tension between the relentless progress of urbanization and the rural longings to which an increasing number of people were subject’.” Keith Thomas tells us that the art of the late eighteenth century/early nineteenth century was ‘in many ways a mystification and an evasion of reality’ since the countryside was depicted ‘as free from social tension; [poets and artists] ignored the gentry’s economic reasons for being there’.2"

Ann Bermingham links the passion for untamed nature of this period to the increasing insecurity in traditional social structures as former class certainties came under pressure. In looking at how this was reflected in art, she comes to the conclusion that “The discrepancies, blindnesses, and silences that the work of art maintains in the face of ideology are themselves ideological positions.”19 * 21 John Barrell explains that:

the disjunction between this ideal image of the rural life and its actuality was not one that preoccupied the artists themselves, for [...] the point of the enterprise was to suggest that no such disjunction existed, and in that way to offer a reassurance that the poor of England were, or were capable of being, as happy as the swains of Arcadia, their life as delightfully simple and enviable.22

So what place would the railway find in this fragile construct? How could landscape art respond? Why would artists wish to insert such an ugly, dirty object into their bucolic vision? Francis Klingender tells us that “The art patrons of the day wished for anything rather than to be reminded of the social and technological revolution going on all round them.”23 But he does not say why this should be the same for all classes and types of art patron. I would suggest that the theories discussed briefly above give us a clue, but it is instructive to examine a little more closely the specificity of the railway’s non-appearance, because Klingender’s view - which is widely held today - does not fit with other evidence.

19 Thomas, Keith: Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800. London 1983, p. 253.

211 Thomas: Man and the Natural World, p. 251 ; See also Turner, James: The Politics of Landscape. Oxford, 1979.

21 Bermingham: Landscape and Ideology, p. 4.

22 Barrell: The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt, p. 6.

23 K 1 i n ge n der : Art and the Industrial Revolution, p 137.

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