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We're looking at Turner's great painting Rain, Steem and Speed
The Great Western Railway which dates from 1844.
A time when the railway was really criss crossing
the British landscape. It was a really brand new way of travelling
and connecting cities and people to each other.
It would really changed not only the landscape but changed society incredibly, dramatically.
It was probably the most potent symbol of industrialization.
Tuner really captures that feeling of the speed of the train
coming toward the us, the rain pounding at the train
and the bridge as it moves towards us. I can almost feel
the wetness of this day and hear the sound of the train.
Well the carriages were open and so people really would have felt that. You think
about what the speed of the train meant.
And of course the trains there in 1844 didn't move the speed
the trains move now.
But think about the speed which people have travelled
through history up to this point. People have either walked or they had
taken a horse and if you're lucky to take a carriage with multiplehorses
and could go a little bit faster. But a little bit faster so that
means you might have gone 15 miles/h and for the first time
people had been able to be transported mechanically. I think it's hard
for us to recognize the radicalness of the railway
and the kind of impact it must have had on the landscape. I mean part of this is
kind of nostalgia for what's lost, the notion of the
the violence of this hulking iron monster ripping through the landscape
and it must have been loud. Surrounded by agricultural fields
perhaps, the way that Turner shows us a farmer
on the right edge there.
I think you look at the landscape and you saw those
contrasts between the old, rural England and the new, industrial England.
That's absolutely right. I mean on the left you see the bridge as well. On extreme left
you see an old, stone bridge. Here, on the right you have a modern, industrial
brick bridge meant to carry this railway. But so much of this is
about the subject but it's also about the way Turner painted it.
The atmosphere that we associate with Turner, this kind of gold and
blue and brown coloring and
this thick impasto of paint that we can tell it has been applied with a palet knife, it's
particularly thick toward the sort of center line of the painting
and then the upper right. It's so abstract that much of the painting
is actually unreadable as in terms of anything specific
and it's atmospheric and it's atmospheric almost in an operatic way.
Three quarters of this painting is nothing but
the variations of color and tone of the sky, of the atmosphere,
of the rain and the way which in the sense of the rain creates a kind of unity
and dissolves any kind of hard form.
Any kind of specific reading and forms. The only one really comes through
any clarity is the black iron of the chimney of that train.
That's true, it's only the chimney, the rest of the train itself kind of dissolves
in the painting as well. That idea of confrontation
between the industrial power of men and nature
is probably most sort of oddly juxtaposed by the train steaming towards
a small rabbit in the lower right hand corner
that seems to be hopping away as quickly as possible
and of course the rabbit is a symbol of the speed itself.
I'm reminded that it's the power of paint that communicates to us more than the subject.
That it is really about the textures and the colors
and the globe of paint and the dissolution of form here that
communicate this idea of rain and atmosphere and speed and sound.
It would have been a very different painting had it been painted differently.
This painting is extensively about industrialisation
about this powerful new thing, this train.
But the painting really is about the act of painting itself and it is
about the portrayal of this much more complex and
much more subtle relationship between nature and men.
Because of Turners ability to handle tone and form
with a kind of abstraction that is incredibly
brave for this early period.
It really is.
I mean it is supposed to you know
the abstraction of the twentieth century
in many ways