RAIN, STEAM & SPEED – THE

SHIMMERING VISION OF

J.M.W. TURNER

1843

ONE JUNE EVENING IN 1843 A YOUNG woman, Jane O’Meara, was travelling to London on the recently constructed Great Western Railway through a terrifying storm. Thunder roared and lightning flashed across the countryside, while torrents of sheeting rain attacked the windows – so Jane was surprised when one of the elderly gentlemen travelling in her First Class carriage asked if she would mind him putting the rain-blurred window down. He wanted to take a look outside.

Politely consenting, Jane was still more surprised when her travelling companion thrust his head and shoulders out into the storm and kept them resolutely there for nearly nine minutes. The old man was evidently engrossed by what he saw, and when he finally drew back in, drenched, the young woman could not resist the temptation to put her own head out of the window – to be astonished by a blurred cacophony of sound and brightness. The train was standing at that moment in Bristol Temple Meads Station, and the mingled impression of steam, sulphurous smoke and the flickering glow from the engine’s firebox overwhelmed her – ‘such a chaos of elemental and artificial lights and noises,’ she later wrote, ‘I never saw or heard, or expect to see or hear.’

Almost a year later, going to look at the new pictures being hung in that summer’s Royal Academy exhibition, Jane O’Meara suddenly realised who the eccentric traveller must have been. For hanging on the gallery wall, depicted in swirling and unconventional swathes of paint, was the same scary yet compelling vortex of light and turbulence that she had seen from her GWR carriage window – Rain, Steam & Speed by J.M.W. Turner.

By 1844 Joseph Mallord William Turner was a renowned, controversial and highly successful artist. He was born sixty-nine years earlier to a poor barber-wigmaker near London’s Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market, and a mentally fragile mother who ended her days in the Bethlehem hospital for lunatics – ‘Bedlam’. Turner retained his gruff Cockney accent all his life, along with a shrewd commercial spirit that dated back to the days when he exhibited his first paintings in his father’s shop window at one shilling (5p) each.

Turner’s wild, tumultuous and almost abstract paintings were denounced as ‘mad’ by many Victorians. But the French painters Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and Degas would later pay tribute to the ‘the illustrious Turner’ as the artist whose interest in ‘the fugitive effects of light’ inspired their own great revolution in ways of seeing – Impressionism. Monet came to London as a young artist to study Rain, Steam & Speed which, from the moment of its first hanging in the Royal Academy, was acknowledged by both its admirers and its detractors to be an extraordinary creation. ‘The world has never seen anything like this picture,’ declared the novelist William Thackeray.

The central feature of the picture was the glowing ‘chaos’ of light and energy that had shocked Jane O’Meara in Temple Meads Station – transposed by Turner to Brunel’s famous bridge at Maidenhead in the Thames Valley, one of the artist’s favourite locales for sketching. Enveloped in smoke and mist, the dark and sinister funnel of the locomotive is dashing forwards out of the canvas, a black stovepipe cutting ferociously through the slanting rain, while in front of the careering train – only visible if you step up to the canvas and peer closely – runs a terrified little brown hare, the creature that used to symbolise speed in the age before machines.

Rain, Steam & Speed now hangs in the National Gallery in London’s Trafalgar Square. Standing back from its foaming confusion of colours and textures, you cannot help but be struck by the majesty of the world’s first great railway painting. You can also recapture the excitement of Jane O’Meara, putting her head out into the storm to see what had caught the visionary eye of Joseph Mallord William Turner.