In the USA during the same period, artists such as Andrew Melrose and Theodore Kaufmann left little doubt that the locomotive was something altogether more serious: the great advancer of Western civilisation, heroically facing untold perils.ĭespite its self-evident scientific superiority, in canvases such as Melrose’s Westward the Star of Empire Takes Its Way - Near Council Bluffs, Iowa (1867), the steam engine seems oddly vulnerable, dwarfed by the wilderness and menaced by its inhabitants - a self-sufficient John Wayne alone on the prairie, surrounded by whooping Cheyenne warriors. To a nation that would come to see the Age of Steam as something as warmly cosy as tea and buttered crumpets by a glowing hearth, Pissarro’s Bedford Park train might be the great-grandfather of Thomas the Tank Engine. There’s a hint here of what is to come - the steam locomotive transformed from malevolent dragon, via symbol of thrusting modernism, to benign and cheerful workhorse. The puffing little engine is flanked by neatly trimmed hedges, homely allotment sheds and immaculate white signal posts. In Camille Pissarro’s The Train, Bedford Park (1897), the suburban English scene is even jauntier than that of Frith. Perhaps this almost inbuilt nostalgia was peculiar to British steam trains. Yet Turner’s locomotive also seems less a defacer of the landscape than an integral part of it, merging with a cloudy, wet England steam a natural source of energy in a country so proverbially damp and foggy. Already, it seems, man has surrendered hegemony of the world to his own creations. Boatmen and ploughmen are barely visible through the smoke, and what appears to be a hare attempts to race with the machine but is outpaced. ![]() ![]() Here, a Gooch Firefly locomotive thrashes across Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s bridge over the Thames at Maidenhead. ![]() Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway, first exhibited in 1844. There are hints of both attitudes in J.M.W. Soon there would be a new generation of painters born and raised in the Steam Age who would, as Émile Zola observed, ‘find poetry in train stations the way their fathers found poetry in forests and rivers’. William Wordsworth was disgusted, his friend John Ruskin horrified. The railway appeared a mobile version of the dark satanic mills that defaced William Blake’s pastoral English Jerusalem: a dirty hooligan beast smashing rural harmony, a roaring symbol of ignorance and insensitivity. Few of those who made that rattling, sooty trip could have imagined that what they had just experienced would not only dramatically transform the world, but also alter for ever the way it was perceived.Īt first, artists were appalled by this latest product of the industrial revolution. It was a journey of 8½ miles, covered - if you allow for pauses to clear the line and unblock an engine valve - at an average speed of eight miles per hour. ![]() Named Locomotion No 1, the steam engine was hauling 20 coal wagons and an experimental passenger coach containing close to 600 people.Ī little over two hours later, the world’s first passenger train pulled in to its destination, Darlington. In the autumn of 1825, a wheezing, panting, cast-iron contraption designed by George and Robert Stephenson chugged out of the County Durham town of Shildon in the north of England.
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