Rain, Steam and Speed, by JMW Turner

“Rain, Steam and Speed” is one of JMW Turner’s best-known works. It marks him out as one of the greatest painters of all time.

Rain, Steam and Speed

The full title of this painting is “Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway”. It was first exhibited in 1844 and is now on view at London’s National Gallery. It was painted in oils on canvas and measures 91 centimetres by 122 centimetres (36 inches by 48 inches).

JMW Turner was always fascinated by light and movement, and this mature painting (he was 69 in 1844 and had seven years left to live) is a prime example of how he was able to bring dramatic atmospheric effects to canvas. These are well summarised by the title, as the combination of bad weather and the steam and smoke from a speeding railway train dominate the painting.

The scene

The scene is a railway bridge over a river, with a train hurtling towards the viewer. The bridge is generally accepted to be Maidenhead Bridge over the River Thames, completed in 1838 to carry Brunel’s Great Western Railway between London and Bristol. By the time that Turner painted “Rain, Steam and Speed”, which may have been a year or more before its exhibition date, the railway was complete and express trains thundered their way from the capital to England’s premier port for transatlantic travel, where Brunel’s steamship, the “Great Western”, was ready to take passengers to America.

However, railway travel was still a novelty for most people, and Brunel’s railway was special in several respects. For one thing, it was built to the “broad gauge” of seven feet (and a quarter of an inch) as opposed to the standard gauge of four feet, eight and half inches. Brunel’s structures, and his locomotives, were therefore 67% bigger than anything to be seen on other railways. He also took care to build his main line as straight as possible and with gradual gradients. Maidenhead Bridge was a case in point, being built with wide, flat arches so that the line did not have to climb to cross the river. All this was done with the aim of running trains as fast as possible so as to reduce journey times to a minimum.

From an artist’s perspective, standing on the western bank alongside the bridge, the sight of a broad gauge locomotive powering over the bridge would have been particularly impressive. At this point, travelling westward, express trains would be about 25 miles into their journey, travelling fast but still piling on the coal to build and maintain their speed. Nothing in the world moved as fast as a Brunel express; 60 miles an hour might not sound that impressive today, but in the 1840s it was quite something!

So what Turner painted was a wonder of the age, a black monster charging towards him belting out clouds of smoke and steam, made even more dramatic by the filthy weather that blanketed the scene and made everything indistinct. The scene would appear to have been painted in the early evening, because the locomotive is carrying a lamp that shines into the murk, and the carriages behind have their gas lamps lit.

The canvas

It is typical of Turner that the focal point of the painting occupies a relatively small portion of the canvas. The far side of the bridge, where it disappears into the opposite bank, is at the midpoint of the painting, with the train heading towards the bottom right-hand corner. The train itself still has some way to go before it passes the artist’s viewpoint, although in reality this would only take a few seconds.

The whole of the top half of the canvas is rain-laden sky, painted in swirls of yellow, grey and blue, presumably catching the light of a watery setting sun behind the observer’s head.

The left-hand side of the canvas is a view of the river, the trees on the far bank (there is actually an island in the river at this point, but it is difficult to distinguish in Turner’s painting), and the land rising to the left. One can see on the extreme left the bridge that carries the Great West Road (the modern A4) over the river, and there is a small boat on the river. Turner has cheated a bit with the perspective, because the river is almost straight at this point, but in his painting it looks to curve round between the two bridges.

The yellow light in the clouds is also seen lower down, where it is the smoke and steam from the locomotive that has caught the light as it sweeps down from the bridge to obscure the view. Across the whole scene the rain angles across from top right to bottom left.

An interesting detail that can just be made out is on the railway bridge itself, where a hare runs for its life ahead of the train. Once on the bridge it would have had nowhere else to escape to once the train arrived, and the viewer can but wonder if it survived!

As mentioned above, Turner’s aim, especially in his later years, was to capture the pure value of light as it changed according to what the elemental forces of nature did to it. Here the theme is developed with the introduction of a new force, namely that of a machine at speed.

In his earlier “The Fighting Temeraire” (1838) the steam tug is an excrescence, responsible in its way for helping to destroy something pure and natural, namely a wooden ship propelled only by the wind. In “Rain, Steam and Speed” the machine both triumphs over nature and is absorbed by it.

Turner therefore seems to have mixed feelings about the coming of the Railway Age. Nature, as represented by the hare, cannot accommodate it but must either escape or perish. The railway is domineering and disturbing, but it also has its own beauty and its power is impressive. The new bridge is sturdy and here to stay, painted in strong dark reds and browns, while the old bridge, carrying the road, fades palely into the background.

That said, the painting cannot be said to celebrate the railway, in that the train itself is only a contributor to the overall scene and not a dominant feature. This is not a painting of a train, but a painting of the effect that a train has on its surroundings, in combination with the forces of nature. This is a painting that accepts modern technology, not exactly with open arms but with the attitude that this is how the world is changing. Mankind, as well as nature, had better learn to live with it.

© John Welford