The Fighting Temeraire
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 to 1851) · 1839
A ghostly warship, pale as a spirit, is towed up the Thames by a small black steam tug while the sun sets in a blaze of red and gold. The ship is the Temeraire, a ninety eight gun veteran that fought beside Nelson's Victory at Trafalgar in 1805. By 1838 she was worn out, and the Navy sold her to a shipbreaker who had her hauled from Sheerness to Rotherhithe to be broken up for timber. Turner turned that unglamorous journey into an elegy for a whole age of sail.
Notice how Turner arranged the picture as a contrast. The old ship is painted in cool whites and silvers, her masts bare, drifting like a memory, while the tug is dark, squat and busy, belching fire and smoke from its funnel. The sunset fills the right half of the canvas in thick, dragged paint, and a cold moon rises on the left. None of this is quite accurate: the real tow happened in daylight, the masts had already been removed, and the sun sets in the west while the ship travels east. Turner was after truth of feeling, not of fact.
He called it my darling and refused every offer to buy it, leaving it to the nation with the rest of his work in 1851. In 2005 it was voted Britain's favourite painting, and it appears on the twenty pound note. Look at the tiny flag on the tug and the way the water beneath the ship holds a shivering white reflection; that is where the picture's sadness lives.
Did You Know? Turner exhibited the painting with lines of verse ending The flag which braved the battle and the breeze, no longer owns her.
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