A locomotive or train can play many roles in art, for example:
In 1978, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris held the exhibition "Les Temps des Gares" with the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, the National Railway Museum in York, and the Leonardo da Vinci Museum of Science and Technology in Milan.
In 2008, Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery held an exhibition entitled: "Art in the Age of Steam."
The following list is in chronological order, oldest to youngest:
In the United Kingdom the Guild of Railway Artists is a group of painters of railway subjects.
The Musée d'Orsay is a museum in Paris, France, on the Left Bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, a Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900. The museum holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1914, including paintings, sculptures, furniture, and photography. It houses the largest collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces in the world, by painters including Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Seurat, Sisley, Gauguin, and van Gogh. Many of these works were held at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume prior to the museum's opening in 1986. It is one of the largest art museums in Europe.
Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy, and to a lesser extent in other countries, in the early 20th century. It emphasized dynamism, speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane, and the industrial city. Its key figures included Italian artists Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Fortunato Depero, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, and Luigi Russolo. Italian Futurism glorified modernity and, according to its doctrine, "aimed to liberate Italy from the weight of its past." Important Futurist works included Marinetti's 1909 Manifesto of Futurism, Boccioni's 1913 sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Balla's 1913–1914 painting Abstract Speed + Sound, and Russolo's The Art of Noises (1913).
Umberto Boccioni was an influential Italian painter and sculptor. He helped shape the revolutionary aesthetic of the Futurism movement as one of its principal figures. Despite his short life, his approach to the dynamism of form and the deconstruction of solid mass guided artists long after his death. His works are held by many public art museums, and in 1988 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City organized a major retrospective of 100 pieces.
The Gare Saint-Lazare, officially Paris Saint Lazare, is one of the seven large mainline railway station terminals in Paris, France. It was the first train station built in Paris, opening in 1837. It mostly serves train services to western suburbs, as well as intercity services toward Normandy using the Paris–Le Havre railway. Saint-Lazare is the third busiest station in France, after the Gare du Nord and Gare de Lyon. It handles 290,000 passengers each day. The current station building opened in 1889 and was designed by architect Juste Lisch; the maître d'œuvre was Eugène Flachat.
The Gare d'Orsay is a former Paris railway station and hotel, built in 1900 to designs by Victor Laloux, Lucien Magne and Émile Bénard; it served as a terminus for the Chemin de Fer de Paris à Orléans. It was the first electrified urban terminal station in the world, opened 28 May 1900, in time for the 1900 Exposition Universelle.
The NZR J class was a class of forty 4-8-2 steam locomotives operated by the New Zealand Railways Department (NZR). Although designed to work on the lighter secondary lines, the class was frequently used on mainline express passenger trains as well as freight. When first introduced, the class boasted distinctive streamlining, which was later removed from 1947 onwards for maintenance reasons. Three of this class remained in service until the end of steam operation on 26 October 1971, when they were withdrawn and entered into preservation. This class should not be confused with the earlier J class from 1874.
The SNCF 241.P is a 4-8-2 'Mountain' type express passenger steam locomotive that ran on the Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français, from 1948 until 1973. Introduced as large scale electrification of the SNCF was already underway, they were the last new class of passenger steam locomotives in France.
An oil burner engine is a steam engine that uses oil as its fuel. The term is usually applied to a locomotive or ship engine that burns oil to heat water, to produce the steam which drives the pistons, or turbines, from which the power is derived.
Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway is an oil painting by the 19th-century British painter J. M. W. Turner.
3830 is a 4-6-2 steam locomotive operated by the New South Wales Government Railways between 1949 and 1967. It has been preserved by the Powerhouse Museum and is based at the NSW Rail Museum, Thirlmere. It was operational from 1997 until 2009 and was scheduled to return to service in 2016 before the need for more extensive boiler repairs was discovered.
Jeffrey Lynn Koons is an American artist recognized for his work dealing with popular culture and his sculptures depicting everyday objects, including balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror-finish surfaces. He lives and works in both New York City and his hometown of York, Pennsylvania. His works have sold for substantial sums, including at least two record auction prices for a work by a living artist: US$58.4 million for Balloon Dog (Orange) in 2013 and US$91.1 million for Rabbit in 2019.
Cubist sculpture developed in parallel with Cubist painting, beginning in Paris around 1909 with its proto-Cubist phase, and evolving through the early 1920s. Just as Cubist painting, Cubist sculpture is rooted in Paul Cézanne's reduction of painted objects into component planes and geometric solids; cubes, spheres, cylinders, and cones. Presenting fragments and facets of objects that could be visually interpreted in different ways had the effect of 'revealing the structure' of the object. Cubist sculpture essentially is the dynamic rendering of three-dimensional objects in the language of non-Euclidean geometry by shifting viewpoints of volume or mass in terms of spherical, flat and hyperbolic surfaces.
Ascq station is a railway station serving the former village of Ascq, now part of Villeneuve-d'Ascq city, Nord department, northern France.
Mont Sainte-Victoire and the Viaduct of the Arc River Valley is an oil painting on canvas completed by the French artist Paul Cézanne between 1882 and 1885. It depicts Montagne Sainte-Victoire and the valley of the Arc River, with Cézanne's hometown of Aix-en-Provence in the background. Once owned by the art collectors and patrons Henry and Louisine Havemeyer, the painting was bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York after the latter's death in 1929.
Cuthbert (Chip) Hamilton Ellis FRSA was an English railway writer and painter. He was an Associate of the Institution of Locomotive Engineers and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
The South Australian Railways 700 class was a class of 2-8-2 steam locomotives operated by the South Australian Railways.
Football Players is a 1912–13 painting by the French artist Albert Gleizes. The work was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants, Paris, March–May 1913. September through December 1913 the painting was exhibited at Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon, Berlin. The work was featured at Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona, 29 November – 12 December 1916, Gleizes' first one-person show. The work was again exhibited at Galeries Dalmau 16 October – 6 November 1926. Stylistically Gleizes' Football Players exemplifies the principle of mobile perspective laid out in Du "Cubisme", written by himself and French painter Jean Metzinger. Guillaume Apollinaire wrote about Les Joueurs de football in an article titled "Le Salon des indépendants", published in L'Intransigeant, 18 March 1913, and again in "A travers le Salon des indépendants", published in Montjoie!, Numéro Spécial, 18 March 1913.
Gare Saint-Lazare is a series of oil paintings by the French artist Claude Monet. The paintings depict the smoky interior of this railway station in varied atmospheric conditions and from various points of view. The series contains twelve paintings, all created in 1877 in Paris. This was Monet's first series of paintings concentrating on a single theme.
States of Mind I:The Farewells is the first in a series of three oil paintings by the Italian Futurist painter Umberto Boccioni which are all in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City. Executed in 1911 and set in a railway station, the three works attempt to depict the psychological aspects of the drama and emotion of modern travel.
Canadian Pacific 972 is a preserved D-10j class 4-6-0 "Ten-wheeler" type steam locomotive built by the Montreal Locomotive Works. It was used for pulling branchline and mainline freight trains for the Canadian Pacific Railway, until it was removed from service in 1959. It eventually became famous for pulling multiple mainline excursion trains throughout the state of Pennsylvania under the ownership of George Hart. It was sold to the Strasburg Rail Road in 1995, who had an initial plan to rebuild it to pull their own tourist trains. As of 2025, No. 972 is stored outdoors and disassembled in the Strasburg Rail Road's yard.
Media related to Trains in art at Wikimedia Commons
