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 A fourth, and related, piece of evidence is that there were, in fact, art patrons who commissioned well-known artists to paint industrial or railway sites that had special meaning for the purchaser, continuing a late eighteenth century tradition. Early on, railways made an appearance in a particular type of directly commissioned art. It had long been typical for landowners to commission a portrait of a prize agricultural animal, to gratify the pride of the owner and, implicitly, to celebrate the source of wealth creation. This tradition carried over to include the early steam replacements for working animals. The Steam Elephant, discovered a few years ago by Beamish North of England Open Air Museum and dating from c. 1815, is one example of this.'" Industrial sites and railway sites were also painted on private commissions. At the end of the eighteenth century the Earl of Anglesey commissioned an oil painting of his copper mine on Parys Mountain, The Great Opencast, from William Havell. In 1848 the engineer of the Glasgow, Dumfries and Carlisle line commissioned D.O. Hill, a popular Scottish landscape painter, to paint a viaduct over the River Ayr in The Braes and ,D For details, see Rees, Jim: The Strange Story of the Steam Elephant. In: Early Railways, ed. by Andy Guy and Jim Rees. London 2001, pp. 145-170. Also see Murdoch, Jill: From Elephant to Penge West: The railway in the artist’s landscape (unpublished doctoral thesis). York 2003, Chapter 1. 126 Illustration 4: "Steam Elephant " by Anonymous, c. 1815, oil on canvas.
