J.M.W. Turner | Rain, Steam and Speed

About Rain, Steam and Speed by J.M.W. Turner

Turner exhibited Rain, Steam and Speed — The Great Western Railway in 1844, when he was sixty-nine. A locomotive comes straight at the viewer across Brunel's new bridge at Maidenhead, out of a storm that has dissolved almost everything else in the picture. The Thames is below. There is a second, older bridge to the left, and somewhere in the haze a man ploughing a field — the world the train is overtaking.

Almost nothing is drawn. The rain, the steam, the sky and the river are the same substance, scrubbed and dragged into one another, and out of that the engine emerges as the only hard thing on the canvas — a black shape with a glowing firebox. Look closely at the track ahead of it and there is a hare running for its life. Whether Turner meant nature outpaced or nature still faster, he never said.

He was painting the most controversial machine of his age. The Great Western had opened only a few years earlier, and critics complained the picture was formless. Turner had been chasing exactly this for decades: not what a thing looks like, but what it feels like to be in front of it. It hangs in the National Gallery in London.

Own a hand-painted Rain, Steam and Speed

Turner built this picture by scrubbing, dragging and wiping paint while it was still wet, so the rain and the steam are not depicted so much as enacted — you are looking at the actual movement of a brush and a rag across the canvas, and your eye reads that movement as weather. That is why the storm feels like it is happening rather than illustrated. A print records the finished appearance of those marks but flattens the evidence of the hand that made them, and the picture settles into a haze. Reproduced by hand in oils, wet into wet, the gestures are gestures again — and the train comes at you out of them.