The Railway: Art in the Age of Steam.(Book review)

The Railway: Art in the Age of Steam, by Ian Kennedy and Julian Treuherz, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2008.

I don't like the the term "train buff," but I do love trains. Whenever circumstances have permitted, I've ridden the sleek European examples and have regularly enjoyed commuting from along the Hudson River to New York City's Grand Central Terminal. But my true love is for steam locomotion--something I am too young to have experienced in its own time. Yes, the electric-powered Eurostar can speed between London and Paris in a little over two hours, careering smoothly over welded rails. But nothing--NOTHING--can match the gutsy canticle of chuffing steam, with its pistons and drive shafts and fragrance of coal smoke, not to mention the unmistakable patter song of wheels clattering along jointed rails. And the bland appearance of the fleetest Bullet train just doesn't thrill my eye like the majesty of a late nineteenth-century American or European steam locomotive pulling a handsome line of clerestory carriages.

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Others who share this passion will take great pleasure in this beautiful volume, designed to accompany the show that this magazine reported on in May 2008, which originated at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and is about to open at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri (September 13 through January 18, 2009). The book represents an interesting collaboration by the two authors, Ian Kennedy and Julian Treuherz, respectively a curator of European art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum and the former keeper of the art galleries at the National Museums in Liverpool, with additional essays by Matthew Beaumont, a lecturer in nineteenth-century literature at University College London, and Michael Freeman, an Oxford University fellow and lecturer in human geography. The result is not just a fine museum catalogue, but a truly comprehensive study of the impact of railways on society as recorded by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century painters and photographers.

Thus the catalogue entries and illustrations range from familiar classics like Joseph Mallord William Turner's proto-impressionist Rain, Steam and Speed (1844), William Powell Frith's anecdotal panorama The Railway Station (1862), and Claude Monet's azure-suffused Railway Bridge, Argenteuil (1874) to surrealist fantasies by Rene Magritte and Paul Delvaux, who were obsessed by trains, magnificent precisionist studies of locomotive wheels by Charles Sheeler, and evocative photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, Use Bing, and O. Winston Link. There are representative works by such American realist painters as George Luks and ...