Pictures to tell a human story

Jan 22 2008 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

Britain’s great gift to the world is being celebrated in a new exhibition about railways in art. Peter Elson reports

THE exploration of railway art was a journey in more ways than one for picture historian and curator Julian Treuherz.

The former head of Liverpool’s renowned Walker art gallery is jointly curating an international exhibition called Art in the Age of Steam, gathered from some of the world’s top galleries.

It is billed as the Walker’s premier contribution to European Capital of Culture, and possibly delivers more key elements than any other event.

The exhibition’s location combines Liverpool’s historic role as the financial promoter of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway (the world’s first purpose-built passenger line) with paintings, prints, posters and photographs from Europe and the North America.

“We wanted a big 2008 show, with big names about a big subject, that would appeal to a huge number of people, worthy of the impact that railways made,” says Julian.

Many of the 100 works on display are by world-famous artists, many of whom, Julian found, were inspired by the arrival and presence of the railways. This means Van Gogh paintings are going on show in Liverpool for the first time since the 1950s, as he used railways as a focal point in several of his work.

“It’s hard to comprehend today just what an incredible change to everyone’s lives the railways had across the world, after starting here in 1830. Everything was altered, even doctors wrote to The Lancet worrying that seeing the landscape rushing past would damage passengers’ brains.

“The nearest in life-changing inventions today is the internet, which has also shrunk the globe in terms of communications and information.But that comparison hardly conveys the huge physical impact the railways also had on towns and the landscape, as the lines reached out across entire continents. To counteract this, engineers used monumental, classical and ancient styles to give bridges and tunnels an air of permanence, implying they’d always been there.”

The show is co-curated with Ian Kennedy, the English director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum, of Kansas City, deep in the American mid-West.

Railways were crucial to the opening up of the US to European settlers, drawing the states together into a union and underpinning the new country’s growing economy.

Paintings like those by George Inness are the sole reminders of the virgin US territories, just at the tipping point when the railway starts to make its mark.

The scope of the exhibition runs from 1830 and the pioneering years, through the Victorian railway mania and boom, to the run-down of steam in the 1960s and the embryonic preservation movement. “We’ve chosen to use the pictures to tell a human story,” says Julian. “I was staggered at the amount of material available, its quality, beauty and the calibre of the artists involved. Although we’re restricted to 100 pictures in the exhibition, we’ve crammed 200 into the catalogue.”

In early railway days, no big- name painters recorded them. The subject was regarded as too raw, too vulgar and not suitable as an arty subject.

“However, the railway companies commissioned many posters and prints to promote and celebrate their achievements, so we have a narrative from relatively early in the 1840s-1850s. I was excited to find a watercolour, by T T Bury, in Liverpool Central Library, showing the Edge Hill – Wapping tunnel, which is rarely on public show.

“Then came William Powell Frith’s epic 1862 painting of Paddington, the first picture of a railway station, which we’ve used as the exhibition centrepiece and on the poster. The critics were sniffy about its modern subject, but as it was bursting with people and life, the painting’s popularity was guaranteed. It inspired many others, including Karl Karger’s 1875 View of the North West Station in Vienna.

“Soon, artists picked up on the opportunity of the train journey for depicting the emotions of meetings and partings, the contrasting reactions of who went and those who stayed.

“The dream of far-away places opened up a whole new world with which artists could feed the public imagination.

“Then came its application to the human condition, such as Abraham Solomon’s twin paintings, First and Second Class, in 1854/5, which literally explored class differences.”

The delightfully-named Augustus Egg took a romantic view with his luscious painting Travelling Companions, in 1862.