Monty Python’s Michael Palin Presents His Favorite Painting, J. M. W. Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed

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 paint­ing, nor 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 trav­el­er, an 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 Ham­mer­shøi, and 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 Temeraire, a 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.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Mon­ty Python’s Michael Palin Is Also an Art Crit­ic: Watch Him Explore His Favorite Paint­ings by Andrew Wyeth & Oth­er Artists

Trains and the Brits Who Love Them: Mon­ty Python’s Michael Palin on Great Rail­way Jour­neys

Free: Read 9 Trav­el Books Online by Mon­ty Python’s Michael Palin

Down­load 35,000 Works of Art from the Nation­al Gallery, Includ­ing Mas­ter­pieces by Van Gogh, Gau­guin, Rem­brandt & More

Mark Twain Skew­ers Great Works of Art: The Mona Lisa (“a Smoked Had­dock!”), The Last Sup­per (“a Mourn­ful Wreck”) & More

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.


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