He painted the head of a heron with a dead fish in its beak – one of a series of paintings he contributed to the Fawkes Ornithological Collection, a four-volume album. Rotherhithe was the home of a wrecker’s yard but in 1838 that place name was synonymous with what was going on underground and out of sight.
looks again at Turner’s ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’ Detail of the train from ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’ Out on the river, the other side of the bridge from the huntsman, are two figures in a boat, one of them is under an umbrella; Turner had been known to fish with his umbrella.
The cloudscape resembles the paintwork of Rembrandt, Andrew Wilton says, a reminder of Turner’s debt to old masters. The translation is by Coleridge. ‘The Bridge in the Middle Distance’ is the title of one the engravings in Turner’s Detail of the hare from ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’Bob Hall wonders what the hare was doing on the bridge.
He appears in the account of the skies written by Hyginus in the second century AD. One of the sisters was Merope, also the name of the daughter of Oenopion, king of Chios, whose father was Bacchus – the Chians were, so it was said, the first people to cultivate the vine and Oenopion means ‘wine-faced’ if not drunk.
The answer to the identity of the hunter in Turner’s painting can be found in the night sky, where the constellation Lepus (the Hare) lies below Orion. In the distance is an older bridge and in the lower right is a small hare. Is the background to the picture the landscape near Cliveden – or Cliefden, as it was called before the name was tarted up by the Astors – or is it an imaginary landscape, made up of elements common to many of Turner’s paintings? They’re no more than blots, but they are distinctly people, and there seem to be seven of them, like the Pleiades. Turner had been professor of perspective at the Royal Academy and proved in innumerable works that he could handle the device theoretically and practically, literally and imaginatively. We can only speculate as to what Turner thought the hare was doing on the bridge in the first place. Please change your browser settings to allow Javascript content to run.
Turner at Tate Britain John Martin, The Great Day of His Wrath John Nash, Royal Pavilion, Brighton Germany Browse this content Caspar David Friedrich Monk by the Sea Abbey in the Oak Forest Solitary Tree (or Lone Tree) Woman at a Window Early photography Browse this content (Dickens in Hares were said to dance, widely believed to change sex, and like witches appeared out of nowhere only to vanish just as fast. The light is the incandescence from this shining along the underside of the boiler.
‘We have tormented the poor animals very much lately and now we must give them a holiday.’ Turner wrote to Fawkes’s son at the beginning of 1851 to thank him ‘for the brace of longtails and brace of hares’.The following year she went to the Royal Academy and was amazed to see the Turner. The canvas is made up of two pieces stuck together: ‘Both fabrics extremely brittle and perished. He moves away from marine subject matter, and focuses now on the railway in Rain, Steam, and Speed-the Great Western Railway (1844). The hare was (and is), as Turner must have been very well aware, the fastest animal native to Britain. This Orion did, but then, when he was drunk, according to Hesiod, he raped Merope.
Homer, Ovid, Boccaccio and the 16th-century poet and mythographer Natalis Comes all wrote about Orion. Turner wrote to Ruskin in November 1848 from the Athenaeum: New as the geometric order may be, chasing after hares is as old as any ancient rite, but who or what is hunting the hare in Turner’s painting? Stubbs’s In one version of the myth Diana was tricked into killing Orion by her brother Apollo, jealous of his sister’s affection for the hunter. The subject matter of Rain, Steam and Speed is the Maidenhead railway crossing of the Thames. ‘New flake loss from the end of the nose of the hare reported while on display,’ it says (in biro) in the painting’s conservation file at the National Gallery. The nearly abstract Rain, Steam, and Speed—The Great Western Railway (1844; National Gallery, London) evokes the Industrial Revolution’s rapid transformations through strong diagonals, bold contrasts of light and dark, and tumultuous handling. Orion had three fathers: Poseidon, Apollo and Zeus – or in Roman mythology, Neptune, Apollo and Jupiter. ‘Of all the chases, the hare makes the greatest pastime and pleasure,’ wrote the anonymous 18th-century author of The place of Orion and the hare in the sky is fixed, but the myth of the giant hunter is not stable.