The model railroad abstractions of Francis Lee Jaques

I had a painting teacher who said that for a time she was a student of noted wildlife painter Robert Bateman, and that Mr. Bateman once told his students that all painting was abstract painting. I found this quite a striking statement as his paintings are extremely realistic; however, she said his reasoning was that the act of painting itself required the painter to make all sorts of abstractions regardless of what category viewers of the work might place one’s paintings. A painting of an animal was not the animal itself, but a representation - an abstraction - of a real one. 

Recently Vince was telling me about the model railroading work of Francis Lee Jaques, the famous wildlife painter and dioramist at New York’s American Museum of Natural History. Jaques might be thought of as one of model railroading’s classic abstractionist as he applied all manner of visual diorama tricks to build a personal model railroad of outstanding drama and visual power. Model Railroader’s editors noted in their February 1999 issue that Jaques broke every rule of model railroading and quite a few other things that people never thought to make a rule about but in the end his layout was stunning.

The primary article on Jaques work is The amazing GNR of Francis Lee Jaques in the May ’62 issue of MR, but there are also some interesting track plans and colour sketches of his that appeared in the Sept ’43 and Nov ’44 issues. The May ’62 article is a tour de force of images and methods that produced exactly what the title said, an amazing O scale layout. But, his methods might have been too idiosyncratic for most readers to try for themselves. For example, to make his locomotives appear longer and sleeker he built them to run on S gauge track (even though he wasn’t building a narrow gauge line), and reduced their heights while preserving their lengths. My suspicion was that he might have done this because normally we see these machines running by at ground level where their speed, and our eye-level perspective, makes them seem longer and narrower than they actually are. And if this is the perception, or maybe even just Jaques’ perception, why not replicate that instead of merely the one of blueprint technical correctness? 

When I look at Jaques’ work in MR it makes me wonder if we should think about our current approaches to realism as a type of abstraction, and in so doing, consider if there are other sorts of abstractions that might better suit our purposes. Mirrors and background flats and other such tricks are commonly deployed, but maybe there are others that our current prejudices won’t allow us to consider.