‘Rain Steam and Speed’ (J M W Turner 1844) is one of my favourite paintings. To the modern viewer, it appears easily accessible. It is almost universally thought beautiful and it is often said to have been the forerunner of impressionist painting, and mark the beginning of a modern era of visual art.

Perhaps it was. But what is less well recognised is that it creates a thing that did not exist.

Speed.

The first train from London to Birmingham ran in 1838, just 6 years before this picture was painted. The 5 hour 30 minute journey time meant an average speed of less than 20mph. Before that, stage coaches were timetabled at 5-8mph. In 1888, 44 years after Turner painted this picture, the average speed of the Lindon-Edinburgh train was still  just 40mph. In the 1840s very few trains reached speeds greater than 30mph. And although some locomotives were capable of doing so, the tracks they ran upon were rarely up to the job. The definitions of speed in the OED only begin to reference speed of movement at all in the mid nineteenth century, and then in relation to horses. In fact, until the 1870s every recorded reference to land speed relates to riding horses. The idea of mechanical speed only appears in 1874, and the first reference to high speed trains in 1904.

But now, in Turner’s painting, see what speed does. The idea changes the way we see. As so often happens, the idea precedes the action by means of its expression. Speed makes us paint the world differently. It blurs reality. We can see it before us. The still world has vanished. People and animals are still there, but in this painting we barely see animal movement, the farmer, the dancers in the field, or the hare trying to outrun the engine. Critically, the idea of speed is much more dramatic and more advanced than the reality, and because of this it changes our view of reality.

After this painting, a landscape would never be the same again. Neither would our concept of speed. Speed has become a visual shift. It has displaced our view of the world. It has become a new layer of reality.