Entrusted with the task of finding a painting for the somer season, when soft was the sun, I hit upon George Inness’s railroad-commissioned painting, in 1855, of the Lackawanna Valley. It's at the site's main page. It can't be missed. It depicts a steam engine making its way up the slow incline of the Lackawanna Valley, headed  not directly toward the viewer, in what is still placid green, still largely free of what -- we know -- is to come. The choo-choo itself appears, without railroad cars behind it, and the smoke from its tiny engine echoes the smokestack on the roundhouse in the valley below, and the tinier smokestacks on a handful of  factories also below.

One is reminded of the first few illustrations in that well-known American children’s book, The Little House, those in which the Little House itself is  in the countryside, a countryside that will, as the pages turn and the story be told, be dug into, be built upon, and then built up upon, more and more and more, and the sky darken, and the roads and cars appear, and then a subway system, and then apartment buildings will be constructed, on both sides of the tiny, still cheerful Little House,  now surrounded by dark smoky city surroundings, until one fine day the descendants of the original inhabitants of the Little House arrive to rescue it, which rescue consists of moving it on a flat-bed truck and taking it far far into the still-verdant and unspoiled countryside, and setting it into a spot very much like the one in which the Little House was first situated. And the moral of the story? Not clear, because we do not know, or perhaps we are not to ask, what will happen when that place, too, is built up, and built up, in the same way as before, and the country itself begins to run out of its own countryside.

It is the theme of relentless industrialization, or rather of what Louis Marx called The Machine in the Garden. There’s the choo-choo (that’s the Machine) and there is that  how-green-were-my-valleys valley of the languid Lackawanna (that's the Garden). Indeed, in Louis Marx’s book, this painting – I discovered after it was put up here – serves as Plate 2 in "The Machine in the Garden." And I further discovered, after choosing this painting (and obtaining the agreement of the Management) that Nicolai Civosky, formerly the curator American and British Art at the National Gallery (Washington), in his own study of Inness, judged this painting to be the finest of Innesss’s earlier works and one of the finest he, Inness, ever painted. I also found and while standing in a used-book store, quickly read the long entry on “The Lackawanna Valley” in “Landscape Painting in America” by Wolfgang Born, a refugee from Nazified Vienna who published “Landscape Painting in America” in 1947 and dedicated it “To The Memory of My Mother,” a dedication which made flit across my brain the uneasy thought of the not-inconceivable inconceivable circumstances of his mother’s death. Born describes how Inness has deliberately lightened up things, in an example of what might be called Luminism avant la lettre.

The Choo-Choo or, as such narrow-guage steam engines are called in Russia, Kukushka,  choo-choos its way, a Little Engine That Could, across the landscape. It hasn’t yet grown to full estate; the valley in question has already begun to yield the coal in the groaning seams below – and across the state, at the same latitude – sits Titusville, and an even more sinister discovery, that of oil.

But in the world of the painting in the world of the painting. No one yet senses what is inevitabaly to come, or how that very Lackawanna Valley might yield all of its green thoughts, and green shade, to smoky Scranton (and out-of-work Scranton, in turn, will become in the minds of other, still much later,  viewers not a real place, but the mythical home of Dunder Mifflin, that cross the comedy writers bear between Dunster House and Houghton Mifflin).

And right now, when we see that Little Steam Engine That Could, we are not hysteron-proteronically fearful of what’s to come, as we might have been twenty years ago, or fifty, but instead fond of the little fellow, and wish him well, and hope that trains make that comeback they so richly deserve, and put the automobile back in its place.

Why, some of us may even make a mental note to ourselves that if we ever travel to Russia, we must go and visit the Narrow-Gauge Railway Museum in Pereslavl where, for all I know, working at the museum or living in the city of that museum, the one  that contains old parovozy, steam engines, and displays exhibits devoted to celebrated choo-choos and kukushki, may perhaps be relatives of Nicolai Cikovsky and, come to think of it, of Wolfgang Born too -- both of them examples of immigrants who, true refugees, from Nazis and from Communists, were uncomplicatedly loyal to this country, and though they did not do it for that reason,  in becoming gifted and learned students and connnoisseurs of American art, expressed their gratitude, year-round and not just on July 4, to this country and to what counts the most in preserving the liberty that attracted to this country its best and most deserving immigrants, that is, the Constitution composed by some political geniuses in Philadelphia whose like, alas, has not been seen again.