Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway

Landscape and the Sublime

J.M.W. Turner

Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway

1844

Oil on canvas, 91 × 121.8 cm. The National Gallery, London

A train rushes toward the viewer across a bridge over the Thames, half dissolved in rain and mist. It is an early and famous image of the railway age.

  • Shown at the Royal Academy; the painter George Leslie later reported watching him finish it.
  • Look at the dark diagonal bridge the train is on, not the arched bridge at left: it is Brunel's crossing between Taplow and Maidenhead, in use from 1839. The engine's dark front is a Firefly-class locomotive.
  • A hare runs ahead of the train, added late in thin paint that has turned nearly transparent; Robert Brandard's 1859 engraving still shows it.
  • Speed itself is the subject: the engine seems to tear through rain and space. The new railway draws the kind of awe once kept for mountains and storms.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain (PD-Art)

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