Pushing for Rail 1874

Curator: Thomas Eakins, a painter deeply entrenched in American realism, created "Pushing for Rail" in 1874. It's a genre painting, an oil-on-canvas capturing a specific moment of work and leisure within a landscape. Editor: It has such a strange stillness. It feels vast and quiet, but there's also a definite tension… I mean, someone is about to shoot a bird. Does that strike anyone else as simultaneously poetic and jarring? Curator: The figures are rail hunters; this was a practice common at the time. However, we need to consider our historical understanding of what sport meant then and how it intersects with current discourses on environment and ethics, who has access and who bears the cost of that access. Editor: Yes, that is undeniably present; but more viscerally, I keep feeling for the bird—as though that smudge against the vast sky somehow represents all that space, and life itself… Then there’s all that sun bleached gold grass… very American I guess. It just sits on that knife edge between serene and something quite other. Curator: And I think that sense of unease comes from several layers. Firstly, consider how Eakins has positioned his figures within the panorama: tiny men in a huge field. There's the labor these men would perform daily as they scoured the marsh in this almost brutal environment. Their actions, both past and anticipated, contribute to a system—a political system if you like—in which nature is both intimately known, economically exploited and under direct threat. Editor: Brutal is definitely the word for it—yet isn't there also an oddly beautiful quality, some almost transcendental simplicity, at work as well? Curator: I can agree. The work reflects a precise rendering of space and atmosphere with rigorous attention to light effects that defines so many landscape paintings. We could argue the beauty is constructed, or that this sense of stillness is constructed over the reality of power structures that continue. Editor: Well, I can't look at this now without considering those power dynamics. I'd walked into that painting as if it were any other old landscape painting. Curator: Exactly. Bringing a critical eye to these paintings is vital as we build awareness and reflect on the role our interpretation takes in building a more inclusive future.