Railway station at night

An extremely rare work in the artistic production of Silva Porto (who, except during his Italian period, almost never painted urban landscapes), this painting also displays another unusual particularity in the artist’s choice of a nocturnal scene, which, as far as we know, he never experimented with again.
Yet, unlike so many of his contemporaries – whose paintings celebrated the train and the busy movement of railway stations as an incontrovertible image of the new civilisation – Silva Porto, who did not have a great fondness for cities, chose a provincial railway station, turning it into a ghost-like and bleak figure in which the engine is a tenuously lit body that becomes merged with the night, and the station is an inhospitable and lonely place, equally poorly lit.
It is possible that this station was one of those that Silva Porto used when travelling to the north of the country and that the discomfort of the scene depicted was something that he himself had often experienced. Besides this possible biographical mark, the picture is interesting because of its experimental contents: this is also an exercise in the use of light, which was something that he performed systematically. In this case, however, we are close to witnessing an implosion of its potential uses, allowing us to think that, despite its conventions, naturalism could be a way towards proposing the future of painting, which, by following along one of these paths (at that time quite unthinkable), would lead to abstraction.
It should also be added that there exists, in a private collection, a painting that records exactly the same theme, with the same framing and the same pictorial solution, but, in this case, more open and more practical in terms of the palette that was used. The fact that Silva Porto never signed or exhibited either of these works confirms the idea that he considered them to be personal exercises that he had no interest in showing to a fairly conservative public.
Raquel Henriques da Silva