Of all the English comedians to have attained worldwide fame over the past half-century, Sir Michael Palin may be the most English of them all. It thus comes as no surprise that the National Gallery would ring him up and invite him to make a video about his favorite paintingnor that his favorite painting would be by Joseph Mallord William Turner. “Most people aren’t interested in railways and the history of railways,” he explains, but Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed has great significance to a train-lover such as himself precisely “because it is about the birth of the railway.”
Rain, Steam and Speed was painted in 1844, when train transport “was still a new thing, and a thing that frightened so many people. They thought it was going to destroy the countryside.” (Bear in mind that this was the time of Dickens, who didn’t set so many of his novels before the arrival of the railway by accident.) For all of Turner’s Romanticism, “he must’ve been excited by it. Maybe a bit alarmed.” His painting declares that “this is a new world that’s been opened up by the railways, and it’s got enormous possibilities, and people are going to have to adapt to it.”
In this video, Palin introduces himself as “a traveleran actor, and a general hack.” His many and varied post-Monty Python projects have also included several television documentaries on artists like Anne Redpath, Artemisia, the Scottish Colourists, Henri Matisse, Vilhelm Hammershøiand Andrew Wyeth. In the video below, he appears at the National Gallery in 2017 to share a selection of his favorite paintings, from Duccio’s The Annunciation and Geertgen tot Sint Jans’ The Nativity at Night to Bronzino’s An Allegory with Venus and Cupid (the source of Monty Python’s signature animated foot) and Turner’s The Fighting Temerairea reproduction of which hung in his childhood home.
“It’s just about that period where steam is beginning to come in, and the old sailing ship is no longer needed,” Palin says of The Fighting Temeraire. “On the horizon, there is a ship in full sail” — a “powerful, strong image” in itself — and in the front, the “noisy, belching fumes of the modern steam tug.” Thus Turner captures “the changeover from sail to steam,” much as he would capture the changeover from horse to train a few years later. Like any good painting, Palin explains, these images “make you feel differently about the world from the way you did before you saw it” — and make you consider what eras are ending and beginning around you even now.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.