Rain, Steam and Speed

Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1844, J.M.W. Turner's 'Rain, Steam, and Speed' captures a Great Western Railway locomotive thundering across the Maidenhead Bridge over the Thames in a squall of rain. The dark engine emerges from a vortex of weather, light, and motion in which form dissolves into atmospheric colour — an astonishing evocation of the new industrial age translated into Romantic paint. Widely seen as a precursor of Impressionism and, eventually, of abstract landscape, it is one of the most radical landscapes of the 19th century.

Exhibition Venue

National Gallery

City of Westminster, United Kingdom