Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway

A hare runs ahead of the locomotive in Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway — or rather, it once did. The animal, lightly painted on the rail track, has become invisible in the original canvas because its paint layer turned transparent with age. Today it survives only in an 1859 engraving by Robert Brandard. According to the painter George Leslie, who as a boy watched Turner applying final touches the day before the 1844 Royal Academy opening, that hare — not the engine — was the painting’s true symbol of speed.

Quick Facts

• Artist: J. M. W. Turner
• Year: 1844
• Medium: Oil on canvas
• Dimensions: 91 cm × 121.8 cm (36 in × 48.0 in)
• Movement: Romanticism
• Current location: National Gallery, London

What Makes Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway So Unforgettable?

Most paintings of trains celebrate engineering. This one dissolves it. The locomotive barely holds its shape inside a vortex of rain, mist, and burning light. Turner was not making a poster for the Great Western Railway; he was asking what it feels like when the modern world accelerates past you before you have time to look at it clearly.

The hare story sharpens everything. If the creature was intended to represent speed — and an eyewitness says Turner said so — then the painting’s central drama shifts. The machine is enormous and inevitable, yes. But the animal is faster. Nature still leads, even if only just. With the hare now invisible to the naked eye, that argument has literally faded out of the picture, leaving modern viewers unaware that Turner planted it there at all.

Then there is the date. The standard year of 1844 marks the painting’s first public exhibition at the Royal Academy. The National Gallery’s own records have at points reflected 1843 as the inception date, suggesting Turner may have been working on the canvas before the year universally cited. The distinction matters for anyone mapping his final creative phase.

Historical Context

By the early 1840s, railway mania had gripped Britain. New lines were being authorised by Parliament at a dizzying pace, and the Great Western Railway — designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel — was among the most ambitious of them all. The Maidenhead Railway Bridge, which appears in the painting, had opened in 1838 and was, at the time, the flattest brick arch bridge ever built. Many engineers predicted it would collapse. It did not.

Daniel Gooch, appointed GWR locomotive superintendent at just twenty-one years old, designed the ‘Firefly’-class engines that ran the line. By 1844, sixty-two of them were in operation. Scholars, including Judy Egerton in the National Gallery’s authoritative 2000 catalogue, identify the locomotive in the painting as belonging to this class. The specific engine’s name, however, has never been established — a distinction worth holding onto when railway-history sources venture into speculation.

Turner himself was a habitual user of steam transport, both rail and sea. The notion that he was straightforwardly critiquing industrialisation sits uneasily with what is known of his habits and temperament. John Gage, writing in 1972, argued that the painting’s title points to an allegory of natural forces — rain and steam alongside speed — rather than a portrait of a railway. Yet many critics read the image differently, seeing the thundering locomotive and the vanished hare as an expression of anxiety: nature overtaken, the old world erased. Both readings remain alive in the literature. Neither has closed the argument.

The Origin Story — And Why It Needs Handling Carefully

Almost every account of this painting mentions the same anecdote. During a stormy night journey on the Great Western Railway in June 1843, Turner allegedly lowered a carriage window and leaned out into the rain for nearly nine minutes, fixing the scene in his memory. A fellow passenger, Jane O’Meara — later Lady John Simon — reportedly followed suit and looked out herself.

That account reached print only in 1886, when John Ruskin published it in his Dilecta at his own explicit request. O’Meara wrote it down years after the journey. The National Gallery’s catalogue notes carefully that her account of the painting itself, as distinct from the train journey, is unclear and inconclusive. A direct causal link between the journey and the canvas, the catalogue concludes, must remain conjectural.

This matters. The story is vivid and entirely plausible — but it has been repeated so often, and with such confidence, that the scholarly caveats attached to it have largely dropped away in popular retellings. Turner may have leaned out of that window. The painting may have grown from that experience. We simply cannot confirm it.

Symbolism and What to Look For

Stand in front of the canvas and let your eyes find the locomotive. It takes a moment. Turner places it slightly left of centre, emerging from a diagonal wash of light that runs from the upper right. The bridge supports below it are just visible through the atmospheric haze. Everything is movement and dissolution.

The colours are worth studying closely. Turner reportedly used dirty putty, dabbed on with a trowel, to depict rain — an unorthodox material that creates exactly the grainy, smeared texture visible in the sky. Thick, smeary chrome yellow renders the scintillating sunshine. Crimson lake appears in the shadows. Most counterintuitively, the apparent fire in the engine’s firebox — which reads as hot and orange — was painted using cobalt and pea-green rather than red. These are not errors or accidents. They demonstrate Turner’s deliberate separation of optical effect from literal colour truth: he painted what the eye perceives, not what physics dictates.

The two bridges in the composition — Maidenhead Railway Bridge and the older road bridge to its left — appear to diverge sharply from each other. In reality, they are almost parallel. Turner exaggerated the angle to sharpen the pictorial contrast between old and new modes of transport. He also showed the railway line as a single track, when the actual line at that location was double. These are not failures of observation. They are calculated distortions made by an artist who had looked very hard at the site and then chose to reorganise it for pictorial effect.

About J. M. W. Turner

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) was born above a barber’s shop in Covent Garden and died in a rented house in Chelsea under an assumed name. Between those two plain facts lies one of the most restlessly experimental careers in the history of painting. He was a full Royal Academician by the age of twenty-seven. His output ranged from precise architectural watercolours to near-abstract oil paintings that baffled and electrified his contemporaries in equal measure.

Turner’s late works, of which this painting is a leading example, pushed colour and atmosphere toward effects that would not find their full descendants until the French Impressionists. He left over three hundred oil paintings to the nation under the terms of his will, and the Turner Bequest — formally accepted in 1856 — remains one of the largest single gifts ever made to a British public collection.

Turner at the First Impressionist Exhibition — By Proxy

In 1874, the French printmaker Félix Bracquemond exhibited an unfinished etching after this painting — titled La Locomotive — at the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris (Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, etc., no. 25), grouped with three other prints in a single frame. This is documented in John Gage’s catalogue of the 1983–84 Turner exhibition in Paris.

The detail matters because it places Turner’s image — not a vague stylistic influence, but a specific work after this specific painting — at the inaugural moment of Impressionism as a public movement. The connection between Turner and the French avant-garde is often discussed in terms of Monet visiting London. This is something more concrete: a documented presence at a documented event.

Where to See the Painting Today

The painting (NG538) is on permanent display in Room 34 of the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London. In May 2025, Room 34 was renamed the Blavatnik Family Foundation Room, though it retains the same number. The National Gallery’s permanent collection is free to enter.

The painting entered the collection as part of the Turner Bequest — a gift to the nation, not a purchase — and has never been cleaned beyond the removal of surface dirt since 1856. A lining was carried out in 1966 to address flaking paint. As early as 1857, the Gallery’s then-director Sir Charles Eastlake expressed concern about the growing indistinctness of the smoke behind the engine and recommended it be assisted a little; whether any retouching was ever carried out remains unresolved.

The work has a well-documented history of international loans, including to Chicago, New York, Toronto, and Paris. Check the National Gallery’s website before travelling to confirm it is currently on display and not on loan. In the same room, or nearby, hangs The Fighting Temeraire (NG524), which shares the same non-cleaning conservation policy — a useful point of comparison for anyone interested in how Turner’s surfaces age.

What the painting finally offers is a record of a moment when the world was accelerating faster than most people could process — rendered by an artist who understood that the truest response to speed is not to chase it, but to stand still and let it blur past you. The hare is gone from the canvas now, but Turner put it there, and knowing that changes what you see when you look at the empty track ahead of the engine.

Image: Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway – J. M. W. Turner (1844). License: Public Domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons.