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

Illustration 3: Ridley Hall by John Carmichael, lithograph, from 'Views on the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway' (pub. Frank Graham, Newcastle-on-Tyne, 1836).

J.C. Bourne took a different tack again in his much admired series of lithographs Drawings on the London and Birmingham Railway, produced in 1838 and 1839 at a cost of £ 1 for each of 4 parts, again with the involvement of Ackermann. He very precisely documented the creation of the railway, emphasising the engineering achievement and showing in minute detail the emergence of order from chaos. In reviews of these engravings, the Spectator suggested that Bourne’s pictures offered ‘new features of beauty to the English landscape painter’ and the Birmingham Journal considered them to be ‘well entitled to a favourable place in the library of the studious, as well as in the drawing-room of the idle’.2*

2* Quoted in Klingender: Art and the Industrial Revolution, p. 136.

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