Full steam ahead: JMW Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway

All that is solid melts into air in this Romantic vision of the modern world. Rain blends into the steam of the onrushing train, as the river Thames glows beneath a brick bridge at Maidenhead. People like angels can be made out in the haze. The sky is a pall of doom. The black engine of the locomotive is the one hard, sharp thing in this painting. It comes on like a violent iron fist pushing nature aside
Illustration: Photograph: National Gallery, London