Rain, Steam and Speed: Turner's 1844 Great Western Railway Painting

What Rain, Steam and Speed shows

A train crosses a bridge towards the viewer, its dark boiler and firebox the only hard-edged thing in a canvas otherwise dissolved into rain and light. The bridge runs at a steep diagonal from the lower right. To the left, a second and older bridge is just readable through the downpour, and a small boat sits on the river below.

Catalogue record — Holding institution

Artist	Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851)
Date	1844
Exhibited	Royal Academy, 1844
Medium	Oil paint on canvas
Dimensions	910 x 1218 mm
Collection	The National Gallery, London
Accession number	NG538

Almost nothing else holds a firm edge. The rain is scrubbed into the sky, the far bank is a suggestion, and the paint thins to bare ground in places. Turner gives the locomotive enough definition to read as iron and heat, then lets everything around it come apart, so the engine outruns the picture itself.

The Great Western Railway bridge at Maidenhead

The setting is identifiable. It is the Great Western Railway crossing the Thames on Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Maidenhead bridge, completed in 1838 and notable for the flattest brick arches then built. The older structure to the left is the road bridge. Turner names the company in his title, which was unusual for him and dates the scene precisely.

The railway was six years old when he exhibited. The Great Western had opened through to Maidenhead in 1838 and reached Bristol in 1841, and its speeds were a matter of public discussion instead of routine experience. Turner was painting something his first audience had mostly read about and in many cases had not yet done.

The hare

Ahead of the locomotive, on the track and very faintly painted, a hare is running. It is easy to miss and often is. Once seen it reframes the picture, setting the fastest animal most viewers would have known against the machine that had just overtaken it, without Turner having to state the comparison in the title.

How critics received it in 1844

Reviews in 1844 were mixed and a good deal of the commentary was mocking, which was by then normal for late Turner. His handling had been drawing complaints for a decade, and critics who wanted a finished surface found the canvas unresolved. Others recognised what he was doing with speed and weather and said so plainly.

The painting's reputation rose steadily afterwards. It is now read as one of the earliest serious attempts by a major painter to treat industrial machinery as a proper subject and not an intrusion, and as evidence that Turner's late manner was a deliberate instrument and not the failing eyesight his detractors liked to suggest.

Turner and steam, five years after the Temeraire

Turner had exhibited The Fighting Temeraire in 1839, and the two paintings are often set against each other. In the earlier picture the steam tug is small, black and unromantic, and the sailing ship carries the light. Here the positions are reversed, and the locomotive gets the drama while the older world sits quietly to one side.

The pairing is a useful corrective to the idea that Turner mourned the passing of sail. He painted steam repeatedly across his last two decades and did not settle into a single attitude towards it. What stayed constant was his interest in what moving power looks like in bad weather, which both canvases are really about.

Where to see it

The painting is in the National Gallery in London, part of the Turner Bequest. It hangs in the same building as Dido Building Carthage and The Fighting Temeraire, which makes it straightforward to see Turner's classical ambition, his elegy for sail and his response to the railway within a few minutes of each other.