Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway

A locomotive bursts out of the rain and haze toward the viewer, its firebox glowing through the steam as a hare races along the track below the bridge at Maidenhead. Turner exhibited this picture at the Royal Academy in 1844, when he was over seventy and already the most radical painter in England. By dissolving train, bridge, river and weather into a single luminous rush, he turned the newest machine of the industrial age into an image of elemental power — a founding statement of the sublime in the railway era.