The featured exhibition Art in the Age of Steam: Europe, America and the Railway: 1830-1960 is so large that it takes up all the Museum's exhibition space. It is filled with more than 100 paintings, photographs, prints and drawings by artists including Claude Monet, Rene Magritte, Alfred Bierstadt and Thomas Hart Benton.
Among all the amazing works of art, there are lots of little stories. For instance, some paintings were used to romanticize and advertise train travel while others make a comment on the disruptive nature of trains. Some paintings convey personal traumas of the artists while others show the artists' passion for capturing light, air and color.
One of my favorite stories is about a painting called The Great Marquess by Terence Cuneo. It is from 1967 and therfore represents the "1960s" in the exhibition title. The painting is very nostalgic portraying an old retired locomotive that has been restored to its original glory by a train society in Britain.
I guess that is a more common practice in Britain because the curator commented that the painting isn't really considered that great. It is the sense of nostalgia and the amount of care and time that people put into restoring these trains that made it a perfect fit for the exhibition. He had thought about trying to find one of these paintings and was quite happy to receive a phone call from a friend who told him that his "mum" had one of these paintings in her house and she would be happy to lend it.
Not that the painting isn't worthy of being in the exhibition or nice to see. In fact, if you look closely enough, you may find a small mouse that the artist hid somewhere in it. He was known to do that in his paintings as a sort of trademark. Whenever I see a tour of school children around this painting, they are all eagerly searching for the mouse.