The Royal Academy

Abstract

SCIENCE and engineering have become closely allied, and it is therefore of interest to note the prominence given in this year's Academy to engineering subjects; in many cases, not merely engineering features as an incident in a landscape or in a pictorial setting, but the work of the engineer shown for its own sake. Thus amongst unexpected subjects we find the interior of a garage with parts of a dissected motor-car in the foreground (262), and a bridge under construction (84). Of the same type is 654, showing railway sidings and factory chimneys with, it is true, cathedral towers in the background scarcely discernible through the smoke. The scientific basis of engineering is not far from the surface in “The Ages Meet” (156), where Mr. Stanhope Forbes shows the welding together of tramway rails by the oxy-acetylene process. The setting of the picture is the Embankment at the foot of Cleopatra's Needle. It was a happy idea of the artist to bring into juxtaposition the two human achievements-the modern welding of the steel rails in the tramway track, and the great stone column of antiquity. The task of raising this to a vertical position with the primitive devices available in those days must have been a feat in comparison with which our modern building operations, with their electric cranes and other labour-saving devices, appear but child's-play. As industrial engineering is given such prominence in this year's exhibition, it will be but one further step forward, one is tempted to think, for the laboratories of scientific workers and their cherished apparatus to be accepted as fit subjects for the work of future exhibitors at Burlington House.