The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805

Step back and let the picture work as a whole. Turner did not paint a single moment but compressed the whole day into one image: the signal was hoisted before the fighting, Nelson was shot in the early afternoon, Redoutable sank the next day, and the storm that wrecked so many prizes gathers in the sky. Naval officers hated it. They counted the errors and one veteran complained that Turner had shown the ships in impossible positions. Turner answered that he was painting the truth of the battle, not a diagram. Look at the handling of the water, the flashes of colour in the flags and the way light breaks through the gun smoke; this is the painter of storms and sunsets turning his eye to history.

King George the Fourth commissioned the picture in eighteen twenty two for St James's Palace as a pendant to a painting by Loutherbourg, making it Turner's only royal commission. The king disliked it, and in eighteen twenty nine he gave both paintings to the new Naval Gallery at Greenwich Hospital, from which the National Maritime Museum inherited them. Turner is said to have spent eleven days at the palace altering the canvas under the eyes of critical admirals, and the painting remains the grandest sea battle in British art.

Did You Know? Turner supposedly spent eleven days at St James's Palace repainting details while naval officers stood behind him pointing out mistakes.