Rain, Steam and Speed is usually read as the age of machines arriving in old, rural England. Turner painted a train at full speed crossing a new bridge in a storm and set the old country in the same frame. The details suggest he meant the picture as a joke about speed rather than a warning.
The locomotive belongs to the Great Western Railway and is crossing the Maidenhead bridge, designed by the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, over the Thames. It is half dissolved in rain, a dark mass pushing out of the storm. J.M.W. Turner showed the canvas at the Royal Academy in London in 1844.
The old England is in the picture too. A man plows behind a horse in the right foreground, and a hare runs along the rails ahead of the engine.
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The title promises speed, and the locomotive looks like the obvious place to find it. George Leslie, a boy of nine who watched Turner finish the canvas in 1844, remembered it differently.
It was varnishing day at the Royal Academy, when painters were allowed to finish their pictures on the walls. Turner stood at the canvas with his brushes and, Leslie wrote, talked to the boy now and then. At one point he pointed to a small animal on the rails.
By Leslie's account, that hare carries the speed in the title. It is now almost impossible to see.
The hare that Turner painted last
Turner brushed the hare in late and thinly, on top of the paint of the railway track. The hare's own paint has since turned transparent and sunk into the track beneath it.
In 1859 the engraver Robert Brandard made a print of the picture and gave the hare a firm outline, even a shadow that Turner never painted. Victorian writers saw what the print showed them. In 1860 the magazine the Art Journal described a hare "running for its life from the doom which seems inevitable." In 1878 the critic Cosmo Monkhouse wrote of the terror of the poor hare, about to be overtaken and crushed.
Leslie remembered no such tragedy. In 1914 he recalled Turner pointing out "the little hare running for its life in front of the locomotive," and he was sure the word Speed "must have been in his mind" as Turner painted it.
The Turner scholar John Gage added a plain point: no hare was likely to be outpaced by any locomotive of that period. The line's average speed in 1844 was 33 mph, and express trains reached 55 to 60 mph on the best stretches.
I read the hare as a joke about speed. The newest machine in Britain had just been painted at full power, and Turner still gave the race to an animal. The engine was crossing a bridge that critics had said would not hold.
What You'll Discover
The bridge critics said would fall.
What Turner changed on purpose.
The passenger who may be Turner.
What critics wrote in 1844.