New departure for rail museum as gallery goes big on Japan

The new purpose-built exhibition space, funded with a £250,000 grant from the foundation for Sport and the Arts, is part of the ongoing redevelopment of the York venue.

The gallery means that the museum’s collections, previously unavailable to the public, will now have a space where they can go on display although clearly not all at once, given that the NRM’s art collection comprises of 11,222 posters, 2,358 prints and drawings, 1,052 paintings and 1,500,000 photographs, many of which have never been on public display.

The funding for the new art gallery, part of the National Museum of Science and Industry (NMSI), along with the Science Museum in London, the National Media Museum in Bradford and Locomotion – the National Railway Museum in Shildon, will create yet another cultural destination in York.

Ellen Tait, who will take charge of organising the exhibitions in the new gallery, is staging an exhibition of Japanese Meiji era woodcuts for the gallery’s inaugural show. The exhibition not only gives the museum the opportunity to show off its collection, but also celebrates the fact that it is the tenth anniversary of the arrival at the NRM of the the Japanese Bullet train, the Shinkansen.

Loaned from The Modern Transportation Museum in Osaka, the prints which will go on display to the public from Thursday next week, reflect the period of railway mania which surrounded the opening of the first Japanese railway line between the administrative capital of Edo (Tokyo) and the port of Yokohama.

In the 19th century the woodblock print industry was a way of producing inexpensive, multi-colour prints for a mass audience. In the 1870s the Japanese public were swept away by the glamour of the railway, with thousands viewing the inaugural ceremonies during which the young Emperor himself rode on the train. It was a symbol of a bold new era for Japan.

Tait said: “As these prints were the 19th century equivalent of a cheap and cheerful chain store purchase, not many have survived to the modern day, making a collection like this incredibly rare.

“What is fascinating for many art lovers to discover is that the artists producing these railway scenes had never seen a train before – the prints portray engines and carriages with varying degrees of accuracy.

“Figures in Western dress on the trains or watching them go by remind us that at this time Japan was embracing its trade links with the West at a whole new level.”

The Japan Foundation has donated £10,000 to pay for the transportation and preservation of the woodblocks from Japan to the UK and a curator from The Modern Transport Museum, Osaka has visited the museum to advise on the installation, interpretation and conservation of the woodblocks.

The exhibition will open to the public on July 21 and run through the summer, with an Autumn exhibition called The Art of Advertising, which will showcase posters and paintings commissioned by the London, Midland and Scottish Railway Company in 1924 by 16 Royal Academy artists.