Turner’s painting shows the final journey of the Temeraire, as the ship is towed from Sheerness in Kent along the river Thames to Rotherhithe in south-east London, where it was to be scrapped. The veteran warship had played a distinguished role in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, but by 1838 was over 40 years old and had been sold off by the Admiralty. When exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1839, the painting was accompanied by lines Turner had adapted from Thomas Campbell’s poem, Ye Mariners of England: ‘The flag which braved the battle and the breeze, / No longer owns her.’
It is unlikely that Turner witnessed the ship being towed; instead, he imaginatively recreated the scene using contemporary reports. Set against a blazing sunset, the last voyage of the Temeraire takes on a greater symbolic meaning, as the age of sail gives way to the age of steam.
This is a description of an oil painting by JMW Turner called The Fighting Temeraire. It is a medium-sized, landscape orientated painting: 90 cm high and 120 wide. It was created in 1839. It shows a small tugboat pulling a large sailing ship called the Temeraire towards us along the river Thames. The old warship is a 98 gun, three-decker, built of oak. The tugboat is taking the ship, from Sheerness to Rotherhithe, where it will be broken up for scrap. The whole scene is bathed in colour as the sun sets – whites, oranges, yellows, and browns giving way to hazy blues, purples, and pinks. The large sailing ship dominates the left side of the painting, shimmering in ghostly white and gold. Its sails are furled, making the three masts stand tall, slim, and bare, like enormous crosses pointing into the vast sky. The little tugboat in front this magnificent ship, is by contrast, dark and squat. Paddlewheels either side turn, churning the water to a frothy white, while its black metal funnel spews orange-brown smoke into the air. A few other sailing vessels appear in the distance, but they are overshadowed by the tugboat and towed Temeraire as they progress, on a slight diagonal, heading right. In the top left corner of the canvas, high above the Temeraire, there is a sliver of a pale crescent moon. On the right, a white setting sun hovers over a hazy blue horizon. The thick clouds above and around the sun are painted with expanding swathes of orange, brown, pink and yellow, applied so thickly in places that the paint stands proud
from the canvas. A small rowboat and the shadowy outlines of buildings loom out of the haze on the shore to the right, but they are tiny and dim compared to the vast expanse of colourful sky and water. The calm water below the sun reflects a golden line in the faint ripples. A large dark object, a buoy, bobs in the water in the foreground on the right, balancing the dark reddish-brown tugboat opposite. The Temeraire, was once a celebrated warship that fought in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. However, this scene takes place over 30 years after its prime and the ship is on its final journey. According to the geography of the area, the sun is setting in the wrong place, as the painting faces east, but Turner has swapped accuracy for emotion and symbolism as the descending sun suggest the end of the era of sail. It is likely that the ship’s masts and riggings would already have been removed, but Turner has restored these in his painting to give the ship dignity in its final journey. The colour scheme leans heavily on misty blue and glowing orange lending the painting a reflective, melancholic air. The Temeraire itself is rendered stark and white almost like a ghost ship or vision. Turner has cleverly varied the emotions this patriotic painting may evoke. The sun sets below dense cloud that fills the right-hand third of the painting - this is fundamental to the picture’s elegiac tone, as it reinforces the narrative of the Temeraire approaching its final berth. The sliver of moon on the left is surmounted by a patch of clear blue
sky above. The moon shimmers on the water: it is a crescent moon, a new moon, showing that while one era ends, a new age is beginning.
Text extracted from the ‘Provenance’ section of the catalogue entry in Judy Egerton, ‘National Gallery Catalogues: The British Paintings’, London 2000; for further information, see the full catalogue entry.
C. Baker and T. Henry, The National Gallery: Complete Illustrated Catalogue, London 2001
This is a nineteenth-century French fluted hollow frame, crafted from pinewood and water-gilt. The back edge is adorned with composition guilloche. At the highpoint of the frame are imbricated (overlapping) leaves between fillets. A fluted hollow with acanthus-leaf corners leads to a ribbon-and-stick motif. The flat frieze is embellished with a lamb’s-tongue pattern towards the sight edge.
Turner was concerned with the brightness of his frames and favoured a quality of gilding that would reflect light onto the surface of the painting. This frame, with its burnished gold highlights, was chosen in 1995 for its craftsmanship and to enhance the luminosity of Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire.
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