JOHN COOKE BOURNE, THE RAILWAY ARTIST

As the two main railways, the London and Birmingham, and the Great Western spread out from London there was the increasing demand for illustrations of the massive works and buildings being constructed. The outstanding railway artist John Cooke Bourne, (1814-96), later to be described by Elton as "the Piranesi of the Railway Age" was a highly proficient draughtsman at 18, who started making drawings of the excavations of the London end of the London and Birmingham Railway. This was a cutting from Euston through Camden Town begun by Robert Stephenson in 1834.

In Dombey and Son (1834) Dickens describes the scene: "the first shock of a great earthquake had rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre…Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood. Here a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together lay topsy-turvy at the bottom of a steep unnatural hill...treasures of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidentally become a pond. Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their height...carcases of ragged tenements...wildernesses of bricks and giant forms of cranes and tripods straddling above nothing...In short the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress; and from the very core of all this dire disorder, trailed smoothly away, upon its mighty course of civilisation and improvement".

Later, he describes a railway journey: "Away with a shriek and a roar, and a rattle, from the town, burrowing among the dwellings of men and making the streets hum, flashing out into the meadows for a moment, mining in through the damp earth, booming on in darkness and heavy air...over the canal, across the river, where the sheep are feeding, where the mill is going, where the barge is floating, where the dead are lying, where the factory is smoking, ...and no trace to leave behind but dust and vapour". Ackermann published Bourne's A Series of Lithographed Drawings on the London and Birmingham Railway in four parts from 1838-39. These were well received, the Spectator going so far as to consider: "the pictures represented new features of beauty to the English landscape painter".

It was not until 1845, however, that Bourne was commissioned to execute a series of wash drawings of the Great Western Railway, which were published in 1846 in The History and Description of the Great Western Railway two years after Turner's painting. Bourne explained in his preface: "he intended his drawings to display the stations, bridges, tunnels and viaducts to the passengers who were whirled past them so rapidly that otherwise they had no chance to appreciate their worth." The frontispiece displays Brunel's 'Norman' archway of No.1 Tunnel, Bristol, with the locomotive Acheron emerging with its gleaming copper 'haystack' boiler.

In his view of the entrance to the Box Tunnel, (left) Bourne delineates Brunel's superb classical design of the facade, and the technical details of the locomotive emerging, the broad gauge tracks, and the small figure of the signalman, arm outstretched, standing near the innovative signal mast. Above the tunnel there is the unchanged pastoral landscape with harvesters working around their loaded hay-cart.

In his many landscapes Bourne strives to include the railway as an acceptable feature of the countryside, with 'gentle' trains and never with a locomotive like Turner's, rushing forward, fiery and noisy. He reveals the fine architecture of the stations; for example in Temple Meads Station, Bristol, (right) the train for London is ready for departure on the right platform, hauled by the Firefly locomotive with its large-diameter driving wheels. Alongside the left platform can be seen the rear of a horse-drawn road-carriage, fastened down on to a flat wagon attached to the end of the train with its owners sitting in their open carriage, in preference to travelling in the train carriages ahead. This was a service offered to the gentry who wished to have their horses and carriage available when they travelled from city to city; the horses were accommodated in a special horsebox ahead of the flat-car. Bourne shows off to great effect Brunel's magnificent wooden 'hammer-beam' roof, with a span of 72 feet (22m).

The Engine House at Swindon (left) shows Brunel's innovative construction of a braced timber roof carried on slim cast-iron pillars. This is a well laid out maintenance workshop with the locomotives lined up in their bays on the right, and the transverse travelling 'bridge', which can transport them along the length of the workshop, Here a 'Firefly' locomotive is being worked on by the workshop fitters. The roof-line and the platform edge lead the eye to the dark form of the locomotive standing on the 'bridge', while the left-hand roof-line and rails lead to a distant locomotive and the bright daylight beyond the shed exit. (Sadly these workshops were demolished in 1986, though a nearby building of the same period is now the G.W.R. Railway Museum).

Bourne was convinced that his "faithful delineations of their (railway) construction would gratify both the lover of the picturesque and the man of science, as well as all persons who derive pleasure in contemplating the increasing importance of the commerce, manufactures and arts of Great Britain". He defied Gilpin's thesis that in the picturesque 'the arts of industry are rejected' and that one could never on any account introduce into a landscape the 'industrious mechanic". Disappointed with the lack of success of his Great Western book (though now it is a rare item of great value) he seems to have lost interest in portraying the other massive engineering projects then in progress.

In view of the impact and acceptance of Turner's 'railway' painting establishing the 'respectability' of railway trains as subjects just two years earlier than Bourne's pictures and lithographs, it is difficult to understand why his work should have been ignored in artistic circles. In spite of the earlier good reviews, his name does not appear in any of the standard reference books on Victorian artists. It could have been that because of his pioneering enthusiasm for engineering as a subject he was regarded only as a competent 'illustrator', and not accepted as a modern Piranesi whose comparable skill was addressed to delineating ancient buildings mainly in Rome.

A fine example of the more romantic landscapes which came later is by G.Pickering, Chirk Viaduct, Shrewsbury and Chester Railway, 1848 (right). The railway viaduct with a train crossing the long-span arched iron-truss approach section is seen in the distance on the left across the fields, framed in the trees which line a country lane. In the foreground a scene of rural life is shown unaffected by the railway; a countrywoman leads her loaded donkey past two men lounging against the fence, with their basket of food and drink. The Viaduct is reminiscent of a Roman aqueduct 'marching' across the Campagna to Rome.

An earlier engineering achievement can be glimpsed through the high arches of the railway viaduct; the lower arches of the Chirk aqueduct built by Telford to carry the Llangollen canal over the river Dee. This was the subject for one of Cotman's watercolours, Chirk aquaduct, 1807