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Railway Art By C Hamilton Ellis Soft Cover 1997 144 Pages Indexed
Railway Art By C Hamilton Ellis Soft Cover 1997 144 Pages Indexed
Comparatively recently, by which one means the early sixteenth century, German miners in Transylvania- and even in Alsace-mounted their rolling tubs on flanged wooden wheels, running on rounded timber rails. They made what nineteenth-century lumberjacks were to call pole-roads. These practical essays in Central and Eastern Europe marked the real beginning of railways. So contemporary woodcuts from this period may be described as the first examples of railway art. These illustrations to treatises on mining, such as Agricola's (alias Bauer's) De Re Metallica, were strictly representational.
Who was to foresee what a unique, majestic machine was to emerge from purely utilitarian causes? Its only precursor, and that developed towards perfection over countless centuries, had been the great sailing ship. Beautiful aircraft were yet to be born.
This is not to be a book on railway history, but one concerned with the impact of the railway on a world which, apart from a few dreamers, had never imagined such mechanical advance: the impact upon its social habits, and upon artists who gladly, hopefully, but often penuriously, tried to make a living out of this new phenomenon which quite unexpectedly struck a few of them as being beautiful as well as useful.
Even as late as 1825, the steam railway was regarded as something to do with collieries, by such people as were even aware of its existence. But in that year the Stockton and Darlington Railway was opened in the English North East as a public line for the conveyance of coal from the mines of County Durham down to the Tees. Its inaugural train included an experimental passenger coach, and crowds, apart from the invited guests, climbed aboard the coal wagons for this novel ride. The occasion was recorded in a drawing by J. R. Brown of singular beauty, a drawing which might safely be described as the first work of pictorial art to have been concerned with the mechanically-propelled railway.
Let us briefly discuss four representations of that early opening, including Brown's drawing and three other examples. The first-named, as suggested, is as nearly faultless as anyone who was not there can now believe.
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