It might have been reasonable to expect that carriage prints
- fixed above the seats and below the luggage racks in British Railways
compartment coaches - would have featured views of trains with some regularity.
However, most of the leading artists of the day who were commissioned to
provide artwork for carriage prints seemed to have largely avoided views of the
railway itself. As with the poster artists, they were mainly aiming to show off
the natural landscape and cultural Britain at their best. The railway helped
people make the connection, but was not going to spoil the view once they were
there.
However, Hamilton Ellis produced twenty-four views that were
very specifically of trains for the LMR Travel in…. series and some of the
oldest of all railway pictures made up the LMS Travel on the
Liverpool-Manchester Railway series, comprising of two prints by Isaac Shaw,
each with two broadsides indicating possible arrangements for a variety of
passenger and freight vehicles.
Other exceptions concentrated on bridges and viaducts, most
notably the LMR railway architecture series of sixteen images provided by
Claude Buckle and Kenneth Steele. Leonard Squirrel’s Stowmarket is the only
other station building to form the main subject of a carriage print. A section
of track makes it into the foreground of Lance Catermole’s River Dee at Cambus
O’May, Aberdeenshire, though the artist did not wait long enough for a train to
appear. Similarly, a nearby signal and signalbox are somewhat dwarfed by F
Donald Blake’s Ben Nevis from Corpach, West Highlands. Kenneth Steele is the
railway bridge specialist, with images of the Forth Bridge, King Edward Bridge
at Newcastle, as well as Waterloo Bridge and Lambeth Bridge in London. S R
Badmin is the viaduct expert, with Croxdale, Alnmouth [Northumberland],
Berwick-on-Tweed and Welwyn all represented.
Though railway bridges and viaducts appear fairly
frequently, trains themselves are often not included, as in Holding’s
Sunderland and F W Baldwin’s Beccles, amongst others. In some cases, like McDonald
Patrick’s Tay Bridge, Jack Merriott’s Sandsend and Squirrel’s Colne Valley
Viaduct, trains are included but observed from a distance, so that the type of
motive power is not always easily discernible.
This leaves us with the very few carriage prints in which
the train is a substantial part of the picture.
Cyril Barraud’s Class D49 locomotive, heading a train bound for
Scarborough over the River Ouse at York in the LNER Original Etching Series, is
closer to the artist, but is not the focal point of the picture. This leaves
the work of just three carriage print artists, who have put the train at centre
stage. John Greene shows an English Electric Type Four diesel at the head of a
passenger train threading its way south along the West Coast Main Line in the
Lune Valley and Reginald Lander depicts another modern image - this time of a
diesel multiple unit - in the equally picturesque setting of the Lledr Valley,
North Wales, though in both cases the train is very much part of the wider
landscape.
Without doubt, though, the prize in this particular section
of railway art goes to Richard Ward for his contributions to the Southern
Region [B] Series, namely, Direct Electric Services, Golden Arrow, Atlantic
Coast Express and perhaps his most easily recognisable and pleasing railway painting,
Ocean Liner Express. The un-rebuilt West Country Pacific gingerly rounds the
sharp curve as it exits Southampton docks bound for London Waterloo, sharing
the frame with two equally impressive Cunard liners.
No comments:
Post a Comment