I'd taken of a field at Glen Villa Gardens in North Hatley, QC. Lovely peaceful scene, I thought. The one lone power line crossing the sky seemed a symbol of peaceful countryside that might be almost removed from the crowded highway of 21st century connectedness.
The photo set me thinkning about a painting by Alfred William Finch, a Belgian painter who was influenced greatly by the pointilist Seurat. It currently is owned by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, but it was on display at the Art Galley of Ontario earlier this year in a fascinating show Impressionism in the Age of Industry.(1888)
At first I thought the painting was just another pastoral (literally) scene that the Impressionists are famous for. But then I realized that what Finch was painting was the very latest technology. Those power poles have to have been among the first in the countryside, carrying telegraph connections across the fields. (Pretty sure they weren't electricity wires, since at that time transmission of electricity over any distance was very rare for technical reasons.)If you wanted to, you could read a whole parable in the sheep huddling under the wires, with the dog trying the herd them. Toward what? The internet?
Maybe.
Is that a bad thing?
Don't know. Suffice to say that the creator of Glen Villa Gardens, Patterson Webster, keeps a beautiful blog, and without it chances are I would never have learned about her creation.
2 comments:
That power line meant light and heat for many rural people. Nothing to do with the excesses of our new century. Many of the great environmental errors (as opposed to deliberate crimes) were made in the wake of the second world war. Such as cars and sprawl instead of tramlines and métros, and less sprawling new neighbourhoods. There was a tram in Villeray before most of it was built, and I believe it was the same in NDG.
Doubt if the line was electricity, more likely telegraph because there were real problems in transmitting electricity any distance more than a kilometer or two until 10 or 15 years later. But I think you're completely right about the terribleness of car-based urban development.
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