A new traveling exhibition titled All Aboard: The Railroad in American Art, 1840–1955, will be rolling throughout the United States this year. The show’s first stop is at the Vermont-based Shelburne Museum until October 20. The artwork on display spans over a hundred-year timeline in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, starting with the natural landscapes of the Hudson River School and concluding with the frenetic lines of 1950s abstract expressionism.
All pieces in this show depict the American railroad during its heyday in the mid nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, including images of trains, stations, and the technology and people that powered the railway. Today, the use of the American railroad has dwindled due to the rise of highways, semi-trailer trucks, and planes. The industry primarily transports a small portion of freight commodities and commercial travel. But during its height, nothing could compete with the railroad; it was the main form of transportation for passengers and freight traffic throughout the country. However, the convenience of the nationwide rail network brought hardships to anything or anyone that was in its way. All Aboard critically explores how this once major industry inspired artists to create works that display the “multifaceted role of the railroad as an engine of connection and modernity, but also a vehicle for displacement, abuse of labor, and environmental devastation.”
Organized between four thematic sections, the ride All Aboard takes its passengers begins during the early years of the American railroad with Thomas Cole’s River in the Catskills (1843), which strays from the artist’s typical pastoral scenes with the inclusion of a locomotive passing through a village. The show then follows the railroad’s expansion into the American West and presents the harmful realities of Manifest Destiny and the resulting conflicts with Indigenous communities in artworks like Theodore Kaufmann’s Westward the Star of Empire (1867), that shows a group of Native persons sabotaging a railroad track.
All Aboard then enters the Industrial Revolution, which was made possible thanks to the railroad’s quick delivery of natural resources extracted from rural America. Major cities proliferated in size and wealth by obtaining these raw goods, including coal for electricity, which allowed for government-paid services like public transportation. Such a moment is captured in Samuel Woolf’s The Under World (c. 1909–1910) of a gathering of people from different walks of life taking the electric-powered underground train in New York City.
As the railroad made life easier for some during the Industrial Revolution, the demanding nature of the industry garnered labor strife that often exploded into conflicts between workers and management. The exhibition showcases this discontentment of rail workers in a violent scene by William Robinson Leigh titled The Attempt to Fire the Pennsylvania Railroad Roundhouse in Pittsburgh, at Daybreak on Sunday, July 22 (1877), which was inspired by the 1877 Pittsburgh railroad strike.
of Art, Pittsburgh.
By the 1920s, artists’ sentiments changed to a more empathetic approach towards railroads, depicting them as vessels of loneliness and isolation, which created the stereotype of what All Aboard explains as the “lonely rail.” Pennsylvania impressionist Harry Leith-Ross’s Tenant’s House and Tracks (1918–1920) expertly displays this feeling in a neighborhood divided by railroad tracks. The only signs of life are light in a home’s windows, laundry hanging on a line, and a lone figure precariously walking the railway.
As large cities divided the nation into urban and rural, and the speed of coast-to-coast migration became faster, artists, including many employed by the Works Progress Administration, found inspiration in the people who worked and rode the railroads. All Aboard illustrates this dual experience of the rail with pieces like the peacefully sleeping passengers of Louise Emerson Rönnebeck’s End of Summer (1945), alongside the grueling labor of Harry Gottlieb’s Dixie Cups (1936–1937) and Reginald Marsh’s rail worker in Gathering the Mail (1934).
If you cannot catch All Aboard at the Shelburne Museum, the show will make future arrivals at exhibition partners the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee, and the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. And there’s no need to visit a train station for a ticket; general admission will be all you need to enjoy this journey.
All Aboard: The Railroad in American Art, 1840–1955 • Shelburne Museum • to October 20 • shelburnemuseum.org
