Joseph Mallord William Turner, 'The Fighting Temeraire', 1839

The Fighting Temeraire

Joseph Mallord William Turner

Room 40

About the work

Overview

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.

In-depth

Turner’s painting shows the final journey of the Temeraire, as the ship is towed by a paddle-wheel steam tug from Sheerness in Kent along the river Thames to Rotherhithe in south-east London, where it was to be scrapped.

Built of the wood from over 5000 oaks, the 98-gun, three-decker veteran warship had played a distinguished role during the Napoleonic Wars, defending Nelson’s flagship Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. With the advent of peace in 1815, most of Britain’s great warships became redundant, and from 1820 the Temeraire had been moored off Sheerness, serving mainly as a supply ship. In June 1838 the Admiralty ordered that the decaying Temeraire be sold, as the ship was by then over 40 years old and worth only the value of the timbers. Prior to sale, Temeraire was stripped by the Navy of all re-usable parts – including masts and yards – and reduced to an empty hull. The ship was sold for £5530 to John Beatson, a Rotherhithe shipbreaker and timber merchant. As the mastless 2110-ton Temeraire was unable to sail independently, Beatson hired two steam tugs to tow it along the Thames from Sheerness to his breaker’s wharf at Rotherhithe. Moving the Temeraire took about two days, and the ship finally berthed at Beatson’s wharf on 6 September.

It is unlikely that Turner witnessed the Temeraire being towed – he may not even have been in England at the time – although he could have previously seen the ship when travelling past Sheerness. Instead, he imaginatively recreated the scene using contemporary reports. News of the ship’s fate would have aroused his patriotism. Not only was the Temeraire the largest ship ever to have been sold by the Admiralty for breaking up and the largest to have been brought so high up the Thames, but Turner certainly knew of its action at the Battle of Trafalgar. He had already included a glimpse of the ship in a large painting of 1806, The Battle of Trafalgar, as seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory (Tate, London), and in adopting its nickname, the ‘Fighting’ Temeraire, he explicitly acknowledged its action at the battle which, over 30 years later, continued to be commemorated in literature and art.

Turner’s painting is as much a memorial to the heroic history of the Temeraire as it is a record of the ship’s final journey. He took liberties with the facts, in part to allow the ship to retain its dignity and to draw out symbolic aspects of the image. To this end, he has shown the ship’s three lower masts intact, their sails furled and still partly rigged. He has also replaced the original black and yellow paintwork with white and gold, giving the ship a ghostly presence as it glides across the glassy surface of the Thames. As it moves up river, Temeraire passes a small river craft, its sail hanging listlessly, with a square-rigger in full sail just beyond.

Turner has kept the detail of the Temeraire to a minimum but, tellingly, indicates that the ship no longer flies the Union flag, having ceased to be naval property. The flag’s absence was noted in the lines of poetry that accompanied the picture when exhibited at the Royal Academy, which Turner had adapted from Thomas Campbell’s poem, Ye Mariners of England: ‘The flag which braved the battle and the breeze, / No longer own her.’ The inclusion of the tug’s white commercial flag, flying prominently from its tall mast, adds to the pathos of the Temeraire’s missing flag.

Although the Temeraire was towed by two tugs, Turner has depicted only one pulling the ship (a second tug is just visible in the distance). He has also deliberately altered the construction of the tug, placing its black funnel in front of its mast rather than behind it, allowing a long plume of sooty smoke to blow backwards through the Temeraire’s masts. This revision heightens the drama of the scene and adds the possible symbolic dimension of steam power over taking sail power. Literal-minded viewers were quick to point out Turner’s apparent ‘mistake’, but he was furious when the tug’s design was ‘corrected’ in a later engraving of the painting. Some critics, such as the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, viewed the painting as critical of the tug and what it represented, but Turner’s attitude to industrial modernity was more ambiguous. Although he may have mourned the passing of a great warship from the age of sail, he also acknowledged – and often painted – the realities of modern life and regularly travelled on new modes of transport, including steamships and the railways.

The sunset that fills the right-hand third of the painting is fundamental to the picture’s elegiac tone, as it reinforces the narrative of the Temeraire approaching its final berth. As the critic John Ruskin observed, Turner’s ‘most deeply crimsoned sunset skies’ often signified death. The blazing copper hues of the clouds echo the tug’s fiery smoke and the white disk of the sun itself is counterbalanced by the dark buoy in the lower right corner, which also creates scale and leads us into the scene. As the sun sets, a pale crescent moon rises in the top left corner. Turner had long been interested in the simultaneous appearance of the sun and the moon, but here their presence perhaps also accentuates notions of transition. Below the sun, a forest of pale masts – described by Thackeray as ‘a countless navy that fades away’ – recedes into the distance. The sunset is, however, another instance of Turner’s poetic licence. Not only is it likely that the Temeraire reached Rotherhithe in the afternoon, but Turner’s sun is also setting in the wrong direction. A ship coming up the Thames would be heading west and could not have had the sunset behind it in the east. Turner’s positioning of the sun provoked a lively debate in The Times.

When the picture was first exhibited in 1839 at the Royal Academy, reviewers singled it out for praise, with many noting its poetic and patriotic resonances. Despite offers to buy it, Turner kept the painting till he died in 1851. It seems to have held a special place in his affections – he referred to it as ‘his Darling’ – and he may have decided early on to gift the painting to the nation. It was among the first works in the Turner Bequest to be put on display and remains one of the National Gallery’s – and Britain’s – most popular paintings.

Want to find out more?

Delve deeper and explore the catalogue entry for this painting.

Key facts

Details

Full title: The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838
Artist: Joseph Mallord William Turner
Artist dates: 1775 - 1851
Date made: 1839
Medium and support: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 90.7 × 121.6 cm
Acquisition credit: Turner Bequest, 1856
Inventory number: NG524
Location: Room 40
Collection: Main Collection
Previous owners: Joseph Mallord William Turner
Frame: 19th-century French Frame

Provenance

Turner Bequest 1856.

Additional information

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.

Exhibition history

2013

Turner and the Sea

National Maritime Museum

21 November 2013 - 21 April 2014
2020

Turner's Modern World

Tate Britain

28 October 2020 - 12 September 2021
2024

National Treasures

Laing Art Gallery

10 May 2024 - 7 September 2024

Bibliography

1839

W.M. Thackeray, 'A Second Lecture on the Fine Arts, by Michael Angelo Titmarsh Esq', Fraser's Magazine, X, 1839
1840

R.M. Milnes, Poetry for the People and Other Poems, London 1840
1856

'Turner Gallery at Marlborough House', The Times, 1856
1857

J. Ruskin, Notes on the Turner Gallery at Marlborough House, 1856, London 1857
1857

R.N. Wornum, Descriptive and Historical Catalogue of the Pictures in the National Gallery, with Biographical Notices of the Painters: British School, London 1857
1860

C.R. Leslie, Autobiographical Recollections, ed. T. Taylor, London 1860
1860

National Gallery, 'Removal of the National Gallery Collection to South Kensington', Annual Report of the National Gallery, 1860
1862

G.W. Thornbury, The Life of J.M.W. Turner, R.A., London 1862
1866

H. Melville, 'The Temeraire', in Battle Pieces and Aspects of War, New York 1866
1877

J. Dafforne (ed.), The Works of J.M.W. Turner, R.A., London 1877
1877

G.W. Thornbury, The Life of J.M.W. Turner, London 1877
1879

P.G. Hamerton, The Life of J.M.W. Turner, R.A., London 1879
1895

C.E. Smith, Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake, London 1895
1898

H. Newbolt, 'The Fighting Temeraire', in The Island Race, London 1898
1903

J. Ruskin, Modern Painters, eds E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, The Works of John Ruskin, 39 vols, London 1903
1904

E. Fraser, Famous Fighters of the Fleet, London 1904
1910

A.J. Finberg, Turner's Sketches and Drawings, London 1910
1939

A.J. Finberg, The Life of J.M.W. Turner, R.A., Oxford 1939
1946

Davies, Martin, National Gallery Catalogues: British School, London 1946
1946

M. Davies, Paintings and Drawings on the Backs of National Gallery Pictures, London 1946
1959

Davies, Martin, National Gallery Catalogues: British School, 2nd edn (revised), London 1959
1961

G. Uden, The Fighting Temeraire, Oxford 1961
1966

J. Lindsay, Turner: His Life and Work, London 1966
1966

J. Lindsay, The Sunset Ship, London 1966
1969

D. Hirsch, The World of Turner, New York 1969
1972

L. Hawes, 'Turner's "Fighting Temeraire"', Art Quarterly, XXXV, 1972, pp. 23-48
1979

V. Surtees, Reflections of a Friendship: John Ruskin's Letters to Pauline Trevelyan, London 1979
1979

A. Sakula, 'Admiral Sir Eliab Harvey of the Téméraire: A Distinguished Kinsman of William Harvey', Journal of the Royal Naval Medical Service, LXV, 1979, pp. 153-64
1981

W. Gaunt, Turner, Oxford 1981
1982

M. Butlin and E. Joll, L'opera completa di Turner 1793-1829, Milan 1982
1984

M. Butlin and E. Joll, The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner, R.A., New Haven 1984
1987

A. Wilton, Turner in his Time, London 1987
1987

L. Hermann, 'John Landr on Turner: Reviews of Exhibits in 1808, 1839 and 1840" Part II', Turner Studies, VII/2, 1987, pp. 21-2
1987

W.S. Rodner, 'Turner and Steamboats on the Seine', Turner Studies, VII/2, 1987, pp. 36-41
1988

M. Postle, 'Chance Masterpiece: Turner and Temeraire', Country Life, 1988, pp. 248-50
1988

E. Shanes, 'The Fighting Temeraire', Turner Studies, VII/2, 1988
1988

E. Shanes, 'Turner and the Temeraire', Country Life, 1988
1989

F. Woolf, Picture This: A First Introduction to Paintings, London 1989
1990

D. Birch, Ruskin on Turner, London 1990
1990

E. Shanes, Turner's Human Landscape, London 1990
1990

E. Shanes, Turner: The Masterworks, London 1990
1993

D. Lyon, The Sailing Navy List. All the Ships of the Royal Navy - Built, Purchased and Captured, 1688-1860, London 1993
1994

E. Langmuir, The National Gallery Companion Guide, London 1994
1995

J. Egerton, A. Roy and M. Wyld, Turner: The Fighting Temeraire (exh. cat. The National Gallery, 8 July - 1 October 1995), London 1995
1997

A. Bailey, Standing in the Sun: A Life of J.M.W. Turner, London 1997
1997

W.S. Rodner, J.M.W. Turner: Romantic Painter of the Industrial Revolution, Berkeley 1997
1998

J. Egerton, The British School, London 1998
1999

L. Keith, 'The Rubens Studio and the "Drunken Silenus supported by Satyrs"', National Gallery Technical Bulletin, XX, 1999, pp. 96-104
2000

Egerton, Judy, National Gallery Catalogues: The British Paintings, revised edn, London 2000
2001

C. Baker and T. Henry, The National Gallery: Complete Illustrated Catalogue, London 2001

Frame

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.

About this record

If you know more about this painting or have spotted an error, please contact us. Please note that exhibition histories are listed from 2009 onwards. Bibliographies may not be complete; more comprehensive information is available in the National Gallery Library.

Images

Insights

Matthew Morgan gives an in-depth talk on Joseph Mallord William Turner's renowned painting 'The Fighting Temeraire'. Enjoy an insight into Turner's painting technique, and discover the reasons why Turner might have chosen to paint this warship that served in the Battle of Trafalgar.

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Turner: Painting The Fighting Temeraire | National Gallery

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