Turner painted a train when he was sixty-nine
Rain, Steam, and Speed makes the machine and the weather out of the same paint. Critics complained you could not tell what anything was.
Draft copy. This piece was written during the site build and is waiting on an editorial pass — the facts are checked, the prose is not final.
In 1844 Turner exhibited a painting of the Great Western Railway crossing Brunel’s bridge at Maidenhead. He was sixty-nine.
Almost nothing in it is firmly described. There is a second, older bridge on the left. There is a boat on the river. There are figures in a field. There is a hare running on the track ahead of the engine, which most people never find.
The move
The rain is painted as a thin grey-white scrim dragged across the entire canvas. The steam is the same substance. So the machine and the atmosphere it is tearing through are made of literally the same paint — the thing and its medium are not separable.
The only hard dark in the picture is the front of the engine and the glow of its firebox.
The complaint
Reviewers said you could not tell what you were looking at. They were right, and it was close to the point. By this stage Turner had been exhibiting for over fifty years and had stopped being interested in whether a thing was legible as an object.
On the gallery
The paintings in this piece
The Fighting Temeraire
The National Gallery, London
Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway
The National Gallery, London
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