Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway
(J.M.W Turner - 1844)
The nearly abstract Rain, Steam, and Speed: The Great Western Railway (1844; National Gallery, London) evokes the Industrial Revolution's rapid transformations through strong diagonals, bold contrasts of light and dark, and tumultuous handling.
The picture shows an early morning train from London heading westwards across the Thames on the new bridge, as a rainstorm sweeps through the valley. The railway cuts diagonally across the canvas, from the dead centre to the bottom right-hand corner. To the left of the line is the old Maidenhead road bridge, with the forested escarpments of Cliveden rising above it in the distance. Between the two bridges curves the bank of the river, upon which some people are to be seen, seemingly waving or cheering the train. In front of them, a boat containing two figures drifts across the river. To the right of the railway bridge a ploughman and his team make their way steadily across a field. In the foreground on the bridge, between the broad-gauge rails, a hare races ahead of the speeding train. The picture presents a study in all-comprehending light, its surface a swirling haze of white, gold and blue, out of which the dark shape of the train erupts, prodigious and inexorable. The date 1844 is significant in that railways were relatively new then.
For all its dramatic impact, the railway evoked surprisingly little response from artists during the first two decades of its existence. From the early nineteenth century railways were well represented in what might be called ‘lower’ and ‘popular’ art-forms, in engravings, topographical views and cartoons, but among more ‘academic’ artists there was very little interest in the railway as a subject until the 1860s. In this respect, J. M. W. Turner’s Rain Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, painted in 1843-4, stands alone among the art of the period, as it does within Turner’s own oeuvre.
Turner manifests a sensibility to warm colors, a new informal composition and an interest for modern reality. All concerns that will later be at the heart of Impressionism. The painting offers several perspectives to the viewer: a dark diagonal of bridge and train, crossing the Thames, intersects visions of tranquillity. To the left, far below, a fisherman sits in his skiff and to the right of the picture a ploughman turns his furrow. Ahead of the train a startled hare, the swiftest of creatures, leaps across the track.
Turner as an artist was sensitive not only to light and atmosphere, but to social, political and commercial systems. He was preoccupied by travel and traffic, not only as a habitual and dedicated traveller himself, but as one fascinated by the phenomenon of commerce and the ways it is embedded in the social and physical environment. As a result, his Rain Steam and Speed is alive to the significance of the railway at more levels than the purely visual. The train is an image of speed and power, an expression of the elemental forces of fire and water, but it is also the dictatorial re-orderer of the landscape, an agent of metropolitan expansion and influence, a component part within a network with national ramifications, the creator of a new age of commerce and communication.
The painting can be seen as a hymn to the power of the railway, and an assertion of the beauty of this new technological marvel. By extension, it can be said to be a celebration of the technological future which the railway heralds. Yet the composition of the painting suggests that the railway is also a destabilizing, disruptive force, bursting through existing structures and shattering established distinctions and dispositions. The bold diagonal of the railway thrusts across the canvas, cutting directly across the other main structural member of the composition: a horizontal line, formed by the upper edge of the trees and foliage on either side of the railway bridge and, significantly, the line of the old road bridge on the left of the picture. This horizontal line represents stasis, stability, passivity; the diagonal slash of the railway embodies energy, purpose, power. Turner has further stressed this distinction by modifying the geography of the site, exaggerating the curve of the river and the divergence of the two bridges (which in reality are almost parallel) to strengthen the contrast between the old and the new means of transport, and between the old system of commerce which exists within the established order of things and the new system which cuts through it.
The focal point of the picture is the front of the locomotive. The dark masses of the smokebox and chimney are sharply outlined, constituting the most distinct shapes in the painting. Their clarity against the blurred background of rain and mist draws the viewer’s eye towards the front of the train and serves to catapult it forward from the canvas, adding energy to its headlong onward rush. When W. M. Thackeray saw the picture in 1844 he was struck by the energy of the train which, he suggested, was barely contained by the confines of the canvas: ‘there comes a train down upon you, really moving at the rate of fifty miles an hour, which the reader had better make haste to see, lest it should dash out of the picture, and be away up Charing Cross through the wall opposite’. Although fiery in appearance it is in the wrong place to be the glow of the firebox, whether actual or reflected; Turner’s art here becomes metaphysical, allowing us to see right through the structure of the locomotive to the blazing fire behind the boiler which is the heart of its strength.
A marriage between Art and Industry: this was the hope of Victorian Enlightenment. But it never came to pass. Artist in general found the Industrial Revolution wholly repulsive, and industrialists, for the most part, found only the picturesqueness of the past appealing. neither searched for beauty in the new Age of Steam. Turner was an exception. He admired modernity. "Rain, Steam, and Speed" states emphatically that a railroad train crossing a bridge is beautiful. The engine he selected for his painting was the most advanced type of locomotive of the day, known as the "Firefly Class"; and the bridge it is crossing at Maidenhead was a masterpiece of engineering by the greatest bridge - builder of his time, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Having journeyed all over England and Scotland and half of Europe in stagecoaches, Turner was among the first to welcome this speedier and more comfortable method of travel. He was particularly delighted by the Great Western Railroad, which opened its Bristol-Exeter extension in 1844, the year "Rain, Steam and Speed" was exhibited.
On one of his trips on this railway, during a driving rainstorm, the artist saw a train approaching from the opposite direction. Leaning out of his coach window, he mentally photographed the scene, but when he painted this picture he characteristically took many liberties. because he wished to have the oncoming train in the center of the bridge, he omitted the second track. He also wanted the black mass of the boiler broken up with light, presumably headlights. But the effect is that of a boiler being stoked, and thus the engine at first seems to be pushing, not pulling, its coaches. So that the spectator would know, however, that the train was moving forward rather than backward, Turner painted three puffs of steam, making the one nearest to the engine the most distinct, and the other two gradually less so. As a further indication of the direction of the train, he painted a hare running in front of the engine. Whether, as some have suggested, this is a symbol of Nature about to be destroyed by Industry, or whether it is Turner's method of indicating how slowly the train really ran, is left to the conjecture to the reader. Thackeray, reviewing the 1844 Academy Exhibition, wrote of the printing: "As for Mr. Turner, he has out-prodigied all former prodigies ... The world has never seen anything like this picture." And up to the time of the Impressionists it is the solitary painting of significance glorifying the new age of railways.
Rain Steam and Speed, then, is a picture fraught with ambiguities and anxieties. It is too simplistic to see Turner’s train as ‘a beautiful, extraordinary apparition’ celebrating the artist’s belief in a future he found ‘beautiful’ and ‘exhilarating’. Turner’s vision is more complex than that. It is a truly sublime vision, a perception of beauty, certainly, but a terrible, awesome beauty redolent of vast imponderable energies and dark forebodings. Furthermore, it is a beauty which questions progress. It is not the value of progress that is questioned; Turner was unafraid of change, believing that the world had to undergo a process of constant destruction, re-creation and renewal. Rather, through his visualization of the Great Western Railway, Turner is questioning the security of the foundations upon which progress is erected, and the structures through which its energies are channeled and controlled.