A DEAFENING roar tore through the air, a plume of steam rose to join the clouds and a locomotive hurtled into view on September 27, 1825, pulling wagons full of coal, flour and people into Darlington station—and Britain into the modern era. Driven by its inventor, George Stephenson, Locomotion I had set off earlier from Shildon, Co Durham, and would continue onto Stockton: despite the odd hiccup, the world’s first public railway was officially open. Nineteen years later, another train burst into view, this time on canvas, closing in on a hare as it crossed the Maidenhead Bridge. J. M. W. Turner presented his Rain, Steam, and Speed 180 years ago, at the June 1844 Royal Academy exhibition. Long accustomed to capturing Nature’s might—storms, avalanches, raging seas—the artist did the same with the power of machinery. Although criticised at the time, Turner’s pioneering subject choice spearheaded what would later become almost a genre: the art of the railway.
At first, artists only tentatively began following in his footsteps. The railway was primarily the preserve of prints and societal attitude towards it was often negative. Turner’s own views may have been ambiguous—some critics have seen as an elegy for the Britain of yore, others as a paean to progress, although, in , Ian Carter states that the painting is both ‘about the casualties of progress and the (1853), in which a train plunges into the abyss. After all, the locomotive—the ‘furnace upon wheels’ of poet Walter Landor—was nigh demonic in nature: in 1839, Thomas Carlyle called his first railway journey ‘the likest thing to a Faust’s flight on the Devil’s mantle’. But the very tracks that defiled the countryside also brought it closer: ‘Space is killed by the railways and we are left with time alone,’ wrote the German Heinrich Heine in 1843, who felt ‘as if the mountains and forests of all countries are advancing on Paris’.
