Image credit: The Fitzwilliam Museum
Roads naturally feature in most landscape paintings. As well as providing a route for human and animal traffic, on horseback, in carts, carriages and mail coaches, they are always important to the composition of the painting, usually leading the eye through the landscape.
The railway replaced uniformly poor roads with fast and reliable transport. Turner’s famous Rain, Steam and Speed… of 1844 expresses this new technology’s appeal to Romantic artists.
Travel poster designs illustrate the role of the railways in enabling and encouraging cheap holidays for city workers in coastal resorts. The enormous amateur interest in transport history, its buses, trains and locomotives, and infrastructure, is well represented by many paintings of historic locomotives in transport museums.
