The Berlin-Potsdam Railway

When Adolph Menzel painted this in 1847, the railway was still a novelty in Prussia. The Berlin-to-Potsdam line, the first in the region, had opened only nine years earlier, in 1838. Menzel was among the first German painters to look at the raw ground outside Berlin's gates, the embankments, the wires, the smoke, and see a subject worth a picture rather than an eyesore. A small train hurries across the middle distance trailing steam, the fields around it still half-empty. There is no anxiety about the machine here. Menzel gives the speed and the vapour an almost cheerful shimmer, painting the new industrial edge of the city in a loose, light-filled way that critics would later call a forerunner of Impressionism.