The Subject

English landscape is traditionally seen as depicting the tranquillity of the countryside, far from the modern city, its machines and its commercial transactions. People sometimes forget that old sailing ships in seascapes were the equivalent of modern airplanes. When Constable painted his 'Leaping Horse' (1825) he was showing neither sport nor recreation. It was performing its tasks on the canal towpath. Constable's leaping horse was a working animal, engaged in hauling pottery from Stoke-on-Trent, or perhaps coal or grain. In 1844 Turner celebrated the power of the railway train with his 'Rain, Steam and Speed'.

When John Burgess painted 'Canal, Rail and Telegraph, Offchurch near Leamington', which he exhibited under that title in 1873, he knew that he was stating that modern technology had reached his rural home. The modern world had arrived at this rural spot in stages:

The canals came first. The Warwick and Napton Canal seen here was designed as a link between the Warwick and Birmingham Canal to the west and the Oxford Canal and Grand Junction Canal to the east and south. It was begun in 1795 and opened in 1800. Its fourteen miles included a series of twenty-three locks (one is to be seen here) raising the level from an aqueduct over the Avon to the higher Oxford Canal at Napton. There had been some pressure for it to be built wide to allow barges from the Severn through to Oxford. In the event it was built to the narrow system since it was chiefly intended for the Birmingham trade. The railways dealt a severe blow by their speed to the canals, but their traffic continued.

Robert Stephenson's London and Birmingham Railway was opened to passengers on the section between Birmingham and Rugby in 1838. A Coventry to Leamington line opened in 1844. The Rugby and Leamington Railway seen in the picture was regarded as unimportant when built, 'merely a local improvement'. Its single track line was proposed in 1847 and opened in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition in London. That same year Leamington got mainline status as part of the Great Western line to London.

Telegraphy in the form of semaphore was nearly as old as the canals. The manual six-shutter semaphore was created in 1795 by an English Bishop, George Murray. Various forms of the Murray shutter spread rapidly in England. The idea of electric semaphore was proposed in 1837 by the American F.B. Morse, inventor of the morse code. Another system was in use on the railway between Paddington and West Drayton by 1839. In 1858 a high-speed automatic morse system using only one wire was devised. A district telegraph system was established in London the following year. Such was the pace of developments that in 1889 Coventry opened its own telephone exchange.

The Artist

There may be a clue to the subject and approach to this painting in the early life of John Burgess. Although he lived most of his life in Leamington, he was born in Birmingham. Birmingham had become not just an industrial place of brass foundries but a cradle of innovation, with Priestley discovering oxygen in his laboratory there as far back as 1774. Leamington was a more elegant place, with the Royal Pump Room and Baths opening in 1814, only one of such 'health resorts' there.

John was the son of a drawing master, and several of the family found their livelihood in art. He thought of becoming a painter of figures. He toured Italy, France and Germany more than once, as well as the south of England. Choosing fashionable Leamington as his base, he worked up his views into finished watercolours which he could exhibit and sell at venues such the Society of Watercolourists in London. Modern communications would have helped him make and sell his rural views.

Works by the artist

works he exhibited in 1872 and 1873 show a wide variety of destinations: The citadel and walls of Nuremburg, the abbey at Jumieges, old houses at Lisieux, the cathedral at Abbeyville, a street scene in Amiens and a street scene in Warwick, as well as this present work. His 'Shrimping Girls hastening to the Dover Boat', exhibited in 1870, showed a more traditional approach to the picturesqueness of work.