Contributor: Jorge Bastos da Silva
Location: Author’s own collection
Description: O Panorama (The Panorama) was one of the most ambitious cultural magazines of the Romantic period in Portugal, considered to be the years between ca. 1825 and 1865. This illustration reflects an increasing tendency among Romantic-period Portuguese intellectuals to see England as a nation at the forefront of progress, and the railroad as the means of ensuring the spread of progressive ideas, objects, and people across Europe. It thus serves as a corrective to other more celebrated, and more pessimistic, accounts by Romantic artists of modern technology, its clarity and optimism standing in stark contrast with Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, which the Romantic painter J. M. W. Turner was to exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1844.