If I understand the story right, railroads helped popularize plein air painting in the 19th century. Not in Texas, of course, but in France where there were tons of art students, painters and dilettantes living in crowded Paris at the time. Railroads in that part of the world took off fast, moving people around quickly and cheaply. For a few francs, even the working poor of Paris could afford a ticket to take them for the day into the country, the coast or at least to the less congested suburbs along the Seine. Around the same time, they starting selling oil paint in
little metal tubes like toothpaste. This spared painters the toil of mixing their colors from scratch in the studio and allowed them to work more easily on location. Someone came up with a compact wooden easel with a carrying strap that folded up like a suitcase, called the French easel, that carried all their stuff. For those Parisian artists, outdoor painting in the countryside was a lot more doable when they could take a train to and from and didn’t have to book a room, sleep on someone’s floor or under a tree.
Since 1882, a train has run right through the middle of Bertram, Texas, in Burnet County. That’s the same year Claude Monet painted the same stretch of French coastline again, and again and again catching it in different lights. I doubt many plein air painters rode that train in Texas. It carried freight: rocks, cotton and farming implements. The only river it crossed was the dusty San Gabriel. The French impressionists would not have got this place at all. But there is a lot of light there, as there is all over Texas in the summer, and those painters did like that.
I went to Bertram to paint next to the tracks where the little mustard yellow rail depot stands next to highway 29. It’s a small town where you can hear the train coming for miles. Last Spring, a strong wind blew down the old stone building that housed the BBQ place. A great sorrow. Only one train passed by around 10:00 a.m., and it stop. Didn’t need to. Everyone had their own pickup, including me.
Painting in Central Texas at the tail end of the summer, it pays to start early in the day before the hot sun gets too high and beats all life into submission. Working in that climate is a good lesson in working fast and skipping the details. There were no clouds when I laid in the blue sky, but an entire community of them had moved in when I finished. I had eight tubes of paint in my little box; could have brought more but was determined to keep it simple. Vive la France.
