The Blue Rigi, Sunrise
Tate, London
Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway, J. M. W. Turner, 1844. Oil on canvas, 91 × 121.8 cm. The National Gallery, London. Public domain.
The image on this page is a studio placeholder, not the painting. The open-access file from The National Gallery, London replaces it when the gallery's image pipeline runs — we would rather show you a card that says so than a reproduction we have not verified.
Romanticism
Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway
J. M. W. Turner · 1844
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 91 × 121.8 cm
- Held by
- The National Gallery, London
- Licence
- Public domain
- Movement
- Romanticism
- Country
- United Kingdom
The painter
J. M. W. Turner
Turner was a barber's son from Covent Garden who entered the Royal Academy schools at fourteen, exhibited there at fifteen, and became a full Academician at twenty-six — about as fast as the English art establishment has ever moved. For the first half of his career he competed openly with the dead: specifically with Claude Lorrain, whose golden harbour scenes he set out to equal and then to surpass, and he left paintings to the nation on the condition that they hang beside Claudes so the comparison could be made. The second half is the one that matters to later painting.
Nearby
Related works
Dido building Carthage
The National Gallery, London
The Fighting Temeraire
The National Gallery, London
Norham Castle, Sunrise
Tate, London
Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth
Tate, London
What to look at
Turner was sixty-nine and painting a train. The locomotive comes diagonally out of the top right on Brunel's Maidenhead railway bridge, and almost nothing else in the picture is firmly described: there is a second, older bridge on the left, a boat on the river, some figures in a field, and a hare running ahead of the train on the track, which most people never find. Everything is delivered through weather. The rain is painted as a scrim of thin grey-white dragged across the whole canvas, and the steam is the same substance, so that the machine and the atmosphere it is moving through are literally made of the same paint. The only hard dark in the picture is the front of the engine and its firebox. Critics at the time complained that you could not tell what anything was, which was close to the point.