ART IN THE AGE OF STEAM
Walker Art Gallery
A major exhibition captures the excitement of the steam train in art from the earliest days, through the boom years of Victorian railways to the end of the line in the 1960s.
Art in the Age of Steam, at the Walker Art Gallery 18 April - 10 August 2008, is the most wide-ranging exhibition yet held to look at how artists responded to the extraordinary impact that steam trains had on landscape and society. It is one of the top attractions during Liverpool's European Capital of Culture year.
About 100 paintings, photographs, prints and drawings - transported from some of the world's greatest art collections - come together in a dazzling display covering the years 1830 to 1960.
Among the masterpieces assembled for the exhibition are: The Railway by Edouard Manet (National Gallery of Art, Washington), The Blue Train (Musee Rodin, Paris) and La Crau from Montmajour, with train (British Museum, London) by Van Gogh, Lordship Lane Station by Camille Pissarro (Courtauld Institute of Art, London), four paintings by Claude Monet - including Gare Saint-Lazare (National Gallery, London) - and The Third-class Carriage by Honoré Daumier (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa).
Later works include paintings such as Railroad Train by Edward Hopper (Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass.) and The Anxious Journey by Giorgio de Chirico (Museum of Modern Art, New York), along with photographs by Bill Brandt, Alfred Stieglitz and Winston O. Link.
British artists are represented by one of the best loved of all railway images, The Travelling Companions by Augustus Egg (Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery) showing two crinoline-clad girls in a luxurious railway compartment, while The Railway Station by William Powell Frith (Royal Holloway College, Surrey) vividly captures the hustle and bustle of Paddington station. Others include David Cox, Abraham Solomon, James Tissot, Spencer Gore, Eric Ravilious and Terence Cuneo.
Julian Treuherz, co-curator and former keeper of galleries at the Walker, says: "The highlights of the show are the Impressionists. We have secured some of the most beautiful pictures by well-known names but we also discovered many other artists who created unusual railway images.
"In our research for the show, we discovered thousands of images of the railways but this exhibition concentrates on works of the highest quality. They illustrate perfectly the transforming eye of the artist responding to the revolution brought by the railways, when steam locomotives gripped the imagination.
"Aboard these great machines, passengers travelled at faster speeds than ever before and notions of time and space were forever changed. This exciting exhibition has a wide-ranging appeal for art lovers and rail enthusiasts alike. Nothing has been done on this scale before - visitors are transported on an exhilarating journey in the company of some of the world's great artists."
The exhibition is divided into six sections: The Formative Years in Europe, The Human Drama of the Railway, Crossing Continents - America and Beyond, Impressionism and Post Impressionism, States of Mind and The Machine Age.
