TURNER, TRAVELLER ON THE G.W.R.

Turner, the 'inveterate traveller', enjoyed riding on the Great Western Railway (GWR) taking him to his favourite regions in the West Country. This train travel inspired him, at the age of 69, to paint his masterpiece Rain, Steam, and Speed - the Great Western Railway, (left) which was hung in the Royal Academy exhibition in 1844. He depicts a broad-gauge locomotive hauling a train at speed across Brunel's magnificent Maidenhead Bridge through a violent rainstorm.
Gage observes: "Turner was painting not a view of the G.W.R., but an allegory of the forces of nature, cast in the form of a landscape of striking naturalism and immediacy, but none the less allegorical that its imagery was so modern".

At the time of the painting the G.W.R. had just been extended from Bristol to Exeter, Brunel was aged 38, George Stephenson was 63, Robert Stephenson was 41; the Maidenhead bridge had only been open for five years, and the locomotive, a 'Firefly' class, probably the Greyhound, had come into service just three years earlier in 1841. So Turner was painting what he must have seen as an exciting new contemporary scene, with all the engineering pioneers involved still very active in railway building.

The oft-repeated anecdote about the origin of the painting was told by a Lady Simon, who joined the train at Exeter, in a report to Ruskin: "the other occupant being an elderly gentleman, short and stout...the weather was very wild and a violent storm blotted out the sunshine and blue sky...the gentleman seemed strangely excited, opened the window, craning his neck out and finally calling out to come and observe a curious effect of the light. A train was coming in their direction, through the blackness, over one of Brunel's bridges, and the effect of the locomotive, lit by crimson flame, and seen through driving rain and whirling tempest, gave a peculiar impression of power, speed, and stress." Lady Simon when she saw the painting "in a flash recognised that the subject of the picture was what she had been called to admire."
Gage is sceptical, however, since the train in Turner's painting is running on a single track, and could not have been seen from a carriage passing in the opposite direction, and if she had been with Turner approaching in a coach on the road the level is far below the bridge.

The newspaper critics were torn between amazement and admiration with comments such as: "The railways have furnished Turner with a new field for the exhibition of his eccentric style...the dark atmosphere, the sparkling fire of the engine, and the dusky smoke form a very striking combination...the most insane and the most magnificent of all these prodigious compositions…(he) succeeds in placing a railroad engine and train before you, which are bearing down on the spectator at fifty miles an hour...how these effects are produced is beyond the power of man to say." Thackeray was impressed with the realism; "he has made a picture with real rain...real sunshine...there comes a train down upon you really moving at the rate of fifty miles an hour...the rain is composed of dabs of dirty putty slapped on with a trowel...the sunshine scintillates out of very thick smeary lumps of chrome yellow."

Only the Spectator was hostile: "when he comes to represent a railway-train…the laxity of form and licence of effect are greater than people will allow". It is true that Turner quite deliberately puts a glowing fire-box at the front of the locomotive (detail, left), as if he had cut away the metal from the boiler shell in order to convey to the viewer the natural sources of the 'Steam', the 'fire' of the burning coal, and the 'water' in the tank. It is precisely "the laxity of form", with the hazy outline, and just a sufficient dark form of the top curve of the boiler, and the smoke-stack to identify the locomotive, which gives the wonderful impression of 'Speed'. (Turner here was anticipating the Surrealism movement which would only come half-a-century later). This was the most significant feature of the painting, borne out by the fact that an etching of the painting by F.Bracquemond was exhibited at the first exhibition of the French Impressionists thirty years later in 1874 where it impressed Pissarro and Monet.

Not all the commentators accepted that Turner was celebrating railway travel, and displaying his pride in British engineering innovation. Monkhouse (1878) saw it, like Temeraire, as having the deeper meaning of a warning about the old order changing too rapidly, with his interpretation of Turner's symbolism of the hare running for its life in front of the locomotive, (probably not aware as Turner may have been that the name of the locomotive was Greyhound!) and the ploughman in the field below. His bias against engineering progress shows when he contrasts: "the ugly form of the railway bridge and train, and the beauty and peace of the old bridge", not recognising the contradiction that "the old bridge" he has come to accept was itself an earlier engineering construction which had at its inception intruded into the river valley in order to provide a much-needed river crossing.

Ruskin, too, in spite of his aversion to industrial progress admired the painting, but is reputed to have answered the question why, if an engine is so ugly Turner had included one, with "To show what he could do even with an ugly subject"!
Some art historians subscribe more to Monkhouse's interpretations of Turner's motives. They disagree with Gage, suggesting that the 'sublime', i.e. the awesome aspect was associated with technology and machinery, and the locomotive has a demonic appearance; the expansion of the railway was going to destroy the countryside. Gage is more realistic: "Fast roads, steamboats, and in the last years of his life, railways were the condition of Turner's extraordinary mobility, and his methods of working changed to keep pace with them".

This was confirmed by the immediate popularity of the painting, which has remained undiminished up to the present. Turner's interest in railways was not confined to painting them; he sold plots of land which he had bought earlier to the South-Western Railway Company in 1848 very profitably.

There is no evidence that Turner ever met Brunel, or if Brunel saw the painting. They could have met socially since Turner was a founder member of the Athenaeum Club in London and Brunel had been elected a member in 1830. Brunel had some interest in art for in his drawing room above his offices hung twenty-four paintings, twenty by Sir Augustus Callcott RA, (1779-1844), his wife's uncle, who was a disciple and later close friend of Turner who had proposed him for admission to the Royal Academy in 1810, and four by John Horsley RA, her brother. We can only surmise that Brunel did not consider his own railway a suitable motif, and may have disapproved of Turner's lack of engineering fidelity in his rendering of the locomotive.