Joseph Mallord William Turner ra 1775–1851
NG 524 
The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last Berth to be broken up, 1838

Judy Egerton, 2000

Extracted from:
Judy Egerton, The British Paintings (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2000).

exhibited 1839, with the lines
‘The flag which braved the battle and the breeze,
No longer owns her.'

Oil on canvas, 90.7 × 121.6 cm (35¾ × 48¼ in.)

Provenance

Turner Bequest 1856.

Exhibited

RA 1839 (43); British Council tour, Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum; Berne, Kunstmuseum; Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie; Brussels, Palais des Beaux‐Arts; Liège, Musée de l’Académie (36), and Venice, Biennale, British Pavilion; Rome, Palazzo Venezia, Turner, 1947–8 (42); British Council, for the Van Riebeeck Festival, Cape Town, National Gallery of South Africa, Some Paintings of the British School, 1952 (29); London, NG , Turner: The Fighting Temeraire, 1995 (1).

At the Tate Gallery 1910–14 ; in the Lord Chancellor’s Room, House of Lords, July 1946 ; at the Tate Gallery 1951–6 ; 1960–1; and for the opening of the Clore Gallery, April 1987, for six months .

Literature

Ruskin, Works, vol. III, pp. 246–9, 275, 286, 364, 422; vol. VI, p. 381; , vol. VII, pp. 157; vol. XIII, pp. 41, 47, 147, 167–72; Walter Thornbury, The Life of J.M.W. Turner R.A., London 1862, 2nd edn 1877, pp. 338, 361, 458–65; ed. James Dafforne, The Turner Gallery, 1877; Hamerton 1879, pp. 282–5; Davies 1946, p. 150; Davies 1959, p. 97; Finberg 1961, pp. 371–4, 376, 417–18, 421; Lindsay 1966, pp. 187–8, 202, 255; Grant Uden, The Fighting Temeraire, Oxford 1961; Jack Lindsay, The Sunset Ship, London 1966, pp. 42, 50; Reynolds 1969, p. 178; Louis Hawes, ‘Turner’s “Fighting Temeraire”’, Art Quarterly, XXXV, 1972, pp. 23–48; Wilton 1979, p. 212; Gage 1980; pp. 173, 211 n., 240, 258; Butlin and Joll 1984, cat. no. 377 (with full bibliography to 1984), plate 381; Luke Herrmann, ‘John Landseer on Turner: Reviews of Exhibits in 1808, 1839 and 1840’, Part II, in Turner Studies, 7, no. 2, 1987, pp. 21–2; William S. Rodner, ‘Turner and Steamboats on the Seine’, in Turner Studies, 7, no. 2, 1987, pp. 36–41; Wilton 1987, pp. 144–5, 202–3, 228; Martin Postle, ‘Chance Masterpiece: Turner and Temeraire’, Country Life, 15 September 1988, pp. 248–50; Eric Shanes, ‘Picture Note: “The Fighting Temeraire”’, in Turner Studies, 8, no. 2, 1988, p. 59; Shanes 1990, pp. 38–44; Judy Egerton, Turner: The Fighting Temeraire, exh. cat., including Martin Wyld and Ashok Roy, ‘A Technical Examination of the Painting’, pp. 121–3, London 1995; William S. Rodner, J.M.W. Turner: Romantic Painter of the Industrial Revolution, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 1997, pp. 50–5 and passim .

Engraved

by James Tibbits Willmore ARA , line engraving on steel plate, image 17.8 × 26 cm, lettered The Old Téméraire, published 1845, by J. Hogarth (Rawlinson 661). As published in 1845, Willmore’s engraving alters Turner’s design by positioning the tug’s mast in front of its funnel. The plate was reworked (presumably by Willmore, whose name remains on the plate) to conform to Turner’s design before publication in The Turner Gallery, 1851. Later engravings include a chromolithograph by anon., published by G.P. McQueen c. 1858 (Rawlinson 862), and an engraving by T.A. Prior, 1886.

Copies

Numerous, after the picture entered the National Gallery collection.

Technical Notes

This picture is in exceptionally good condition. According to the MS Inventory in the Gallery’s Archives, it has not been cleaned or varnished since its arrival with the Turner Bequest in 1856, though surface dirt was removed in 1945. The varnish is a little discoloured, but the dramatic effects of the sunset, achieved by the use of impasto and glazes, are unusually intact.

An X‐radiograph¹ shows a large sail, painted on a scale much larger than that now visible behind the tugboat, placed where the tugboat’s mast, rigging and funnel now lie. This suggests that for NG 524, Turner used a discarded canvas on which he had laid in a large sailing‐boat.

Flaking paint and the fragility of the canvas tacking edges necessitated lining in 1963. The stretcher, which has two vertical crossbars close together in the centre and diagonal corner bars, is probably the original one.

For fuller discussion and technical analysis, see Martin Wyld and Ashok Roy, in Egerton 1995.

Discussion

The picture represents the last journey of the Temeraire, sold out of the Royal Navy in 1838 and towed up the Thames by a hired tug to be broken up at a shipbreaker’s yard. Designed as a 98‐gun ship of the line² during the French Revolutionary War, built of the wood of over 5000 oaks in the Royal Navy’s dockyard at Chatham and launched there on 11 September 1798, the Temeraire achieved lasting fame through the part she played in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. With peace, most of the great fighting ships became redundant. Permanently moored off naval dockyards, they were put to various uses (as depots for seamen, hospital ships, convict hulks, etc.). The Temeraire was moored off Sheerness in 1820, serving chiefly as a victualling ship, as E.W. Cooke depicts her in 1833 (fig. 1). Her masts have been lowered, but she was never hulked (the upper deck cut down) as many ships were.³ She remained off Sheerness, never moving, for eighteen years. By 1838 she was forty years old, and decaying.⁴ In [page 307][page 308]June 1838 the Admiralty ordered that she should be sold out of the Royal Navy, though by now she was worth only the value of her timbers. Her fate was by no means unique. By 1838, 14 of the 27 ships in Admiral Lord Nelson’s fleet at Trafalgar had been sold to be broken up; others (always excepting Nelson’s flagship Victory) later met the same fate.⁵

The last days of the Temeraire are well documented. According to Admiralty standing orders, any ship to be sold had first to be ‘prepared for sale’, which meant stripping her of anything which the navy could re‐use – in particular her masts, yards and stays, her guns, anchors, ammunition and stores. The task of preparing the Temeraire for sale was carried out by working parties from her sister‐ship, Ocean, whose captain’s log records the progressive reduction of the Temeraire.⁶ Cooke’s watercolour of 1833 (fig. 1) shows that her masts had already been shortened by then. Finally her lower masts would have been drawn out, like teeth, by the Sheerness dockyard sheer‐hulk, which performed masting and dismasting operations, operating alongside ships like a floating crane.⁷ She was then an empty shell. The sale of the Temeraire and other, lesser ships was conducted by Dutch auction on 16 August 1838, at the offices of the Navy Board in Somerset House. The Temeraire was knocked down to John Beatson, Rotherhithe ship‐breaker and timber merchant, for £5530. From the moment the auctioneer’s gavel fell, the Temeraire ceased to be a ship of the Royal Navy.

Beatson now had to solve the problem of getting the 2110‐ton Temeraire, which had not moved for eighteen years and which, stripped of its masts and yards, had no motive power of its own, up the 50–55 mile stretch of Thames from Sheerness to his breaker’s wharf at Rotherhithe, near the head of the Grand Surrey Canal. He hired two steam tugs from the Thames Steam Towing Company;⁸ the second tug probably worked from behind, at least during part of the tow, ready to act as a brake on the Temeraire, to help steer her round river bends and to avoid collision with other shipping. A news item in the Shipping and Mercantile Gazette, 15 September 1838, headed ‘The Temeraire’ and chiefly devoted to the ship’s past glories, gives only two lines to the tow, but at least names the tugs Beatson hired, recording that ‘The Sampson and the London steam tugs were engaged two days in towing her up from Sheerness’. The tow took place on 5–6 September 1838. An expert reckoning by Pieter van der Merwe and Bill Robson,⁹ based on the tide‐tables for 1838, suggests that having bought the Temeraire on 16 August, Beatson waited to move her until the full moon on 4 September brought spring tides which would help to float the great bulk along. The risk of collision and damage to the timbers as the river [page 309]narrowed and shipping became more crowded, was further lessened by having plenty of time to proceed on both days by morning light, and slowly; the average towing speed over the whole journey is unlikely to have been more than three knots, probably less. Van der Merwe and Robson estimate that the Temeraire would have arrived off Beatson’s yard at about 1pm on 6 September, to be swung round into her ‘last berth’ with the rising tide. High tide at the London Docks that day was at 3.24pm, The Temeraire was probably secure alongside Beatson’s wharf before 3pm.

A drawing by William Beatson, the ship‐breaker’s brother, lithographed with the inscription The Temeraire 104 guns. September 1838 … now lying at the wharf of Mr John Beatson of Rotherhithe …,¹⁰ was evidently made within weeks of the Temeraire’s arrival there (fig. 2). This prosaic drawing, made on the spot by a trained observer,¹¹ is pictorial corroboration of the standard Admiralty procedure of preparing a ship for sale which we know from the Ocean’s log was carried out before the Temeraire left Sheerness. Throughout her tow up the Thames she would have looked as Beatson’s drawing shows her: an unwieldy wooden shell, with no masts, no rigging, no flag, no figurehead, her size alone distinguishing her from all the other outworn wooden ships of the Royal, merchant and East India Co.’s navies which sooner or later were towed to the colony of breakers’ yards around London Docks.

Beatson’s drawing of the Temeraire at Rotherhithe is an eye‐witness transcription of fact. Turner’s painting of the Temeraire ‘tugged’ to that same ‘last berth’ is concerned not with what the Temeraire looked like at her end but with her heroic past and her ill‐deserved fate. The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last Berth to be broken up, 1838 is not an accurate record by an eye‐witness, nor did Turner ever claim that it was. In time, legends sprang up that Turner ‘saw’ the Temeraire under tow while on an excursion to Greenwich with other artists, while he was ‘boating in Blackwall Reach’, when he was returning from Margate on a steamboat or while he sat on a pier in Bermondsey.¹² But it is not even certain that Turner was in England when the Temeraire went to the breaker’s yard; he usually travelled in Europe in August and September, in search of new material. Even if he was in London, it is doubtful whether he would have seen the tow; it was in no sense a publicised event, no lap of honour. No one at the time seems to have commented on the Temeraire’s passing; and no other artist saw a subject in it.

Turner’s picture was probably inspired by reports after the event – though there were not many of these. The Shipping and Mercantile Gazette reported on 15 September that ‘Much interest has been attached to the arrival of this old ship in Rotherhithe, for three extraordinary reasons – namely, she is the largest ship that has ever been sold by the Admiralty for breaking up, and also the largest ship that has ever been brought so high up the Thames, and next after the Victory she was the most conspicuous and the most destructive opponent that attacked the French fleet in the ever‐memorable battle of Trafalgar.’ The Times of 12 October reported that a new popular diversion, particularly on Sunday afternoons, was going to see ‘the remains of the noble vessel which acted so distinguished a part at the memorable battle of Trafalgar’.

Newspaper reports that the Temeraire had been sold out of the Royal Navy to a ship‐breaker were probably enough to inspire Turner’s painting. He had a strong patriotic streak. His memory of the French wars and, in particular, his hatred of Napoleon, remained vivid. Turner was eighteen years old when the French Revolutionary War began in 1793. When the Battle of Trafalgar was fought on 21 October 1805, he was thirty. That battle was to be the Temeraire’s finest hour. Nelson allotted the Temeraire (Captain Eliab Harvey) the position immediately astern of the Victory in the weather column. When Nelson’s flagship was under heavy fire from the Redoutable and in danger of being boarded by her, the Temeraire saved the Victory by firing a larboard broadside into the Redoutable, while simultaneously pouring her fire from the other side into the Fougueux which had borne down upon her. The Temeraire then took both French ships as her prizes. After the battle, Admiral Collingwood singled out the Temeraire’s ‘most noble and distinguished’ part in the action: ‘Nothing could be finer. I have not words in which I can sufficiently express my admiration of it.’ Accounts of the battle, including Collingwood’s despatches, were widely published in British newspapers, and are likely to have been studied attentively by Turner, who embarked on a large painting of The Battle of the Trafalgar, as seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory, exhibited in his own gallery in 1806. That painting concentrates on the quarter‐deck of the Victory, where Nelson lies mortally wounded; there is a glimpse of the Temeraire on the right. The Battle of Trafalgar was the only action in which she took part; but her heroic role on that one day was enough to ensure that when Turner dubbed her the ‘Fighting’ Temeraire over thirty years later, her exploits would be remembered.

Turner’s memories of the war, of Nelson, his hero, and of Napoleon, his arch‐villain, were strongly revived during the early and mid‐1830s, when he was designing vignette illustrations to the works of Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Campbell. His 23 illustrations to The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., 1834–6, include The Bellerophon, Plymouth Sound, depicting a 74‐gun ship from Nelson’s fleet [page 310]at Trafalgar about to transport Napoleon into exile. Turner’s 20 vignette illustrations to The Poetical Works of Thomas Campbell, 1837, include The Battle of the Baltic (Nelson’s victory at Copenhagen, 2 April 1801). He evidently knew (but was not asked to illustrate) one of Campbell’s best‐known poems, ‘Ye Mariners of England’, subtitled ‘A Naval Ode’, which includes the lines:
Ye Mariners of England
That guard our native seas,
Whose flag has braved, a thousand years,
The battle and the breeze…Turner was to take the third and fourth lines and turn them into more poignant phrasing of his own to accompany the title of his Fighting Temeraire. The ‘ever‐memorable’ Battle of Trafalgar meanwhile continued to provide a subject for artists long after the event. Turner’s recollection of the part played by the Temeraire may well have been revived by Clarkson Stanfield’s vast painting The Battle of Trafalgar, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1836. A detail from the scene left of centre (fig. 3) shows the Temeraire in the thick of the action, the Union flag flying from her mainmast.

Having learned, perhaps in late September 1838, that the heroic Temeraire had met the inevitable fate of all outworn wooden ships, Turner must have decided to make a painting of the subject for the next Royal Academy exhibition, in the spring of 1839. He must have worked fairly swiftly and decisively on the picture, especially as he had four other paintings to get ready for the exhibition, each about the same size as The Fighting Temeraire: the contrasting pair Ancient Rome – Agrippina landing with the Ashes of Germanicus and Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino, Pluto carrying off Proserpine and Cicero at his Villa.¹³

Turner was impelled to paint the subject by the fact that one of the most heroic ‘Hearts of Oak’ of his own time had been sold out of the Royal Navy. The fact that he had almost certainly not witnessed the tow would not hold him up. He had observed, drawn and painted ships and shipping all his life – including steamboats, from the 1820s. Recreating a scene from the mind’s eye, and with reasonable accuracy, was a challenge he could meet. In 1818, in the middle of Yorkshire, without a ship in sight, he had conjured up A First Rate taking in Stores (fig. 4),¹⁴ a watercolour image of a battleship slightly larger than the Temeraire. Representing the lines of the Temeraire, a ship which he may often have seen if he travelled past Sheerness, and which was one of a recognised class, was not in itself difficult for him. What must have cost far more thought – deep, brooding thought – was how to retain much of the dignity of the ship now going to meet her fate, while at the same time suggesting something of the change which had come over the ship by being ‘prepared for sale’ (a procedure with which Turner was almost certainly familiar). He achieved a compromise which is moving, though untruthful. He depicted the Temeraire going to meet her fate with her three lower masts in, partly rigged.

Such is the power of Turner’s image of the ship moving tall‐masted towards her fate that a tradition developed, first (it seems) given popular currency in Edward Fraser’s Famous Fighters of the Fleet (1904), that the Temeraire went to her fate ‘with her masts and yards still in her, just as … Turner saw her and has faithfully painted her’.¹⁵ There was a curious reluctance to abandon this tradition, despite the fact that Edward Liggins, an amateur naval historian whose father had served on the Temeraire in her latter days, had written in 1878 to the Keeper of the National Gallery (Charles Lock Eastlake) to point out that ‘The masts &c . were not in [the Temeraire] when she left Sheerness’. In his National Gallery British School catalogue (1946, 1959), Davies cited Liggins’s information that the masts were removed at Sheerness, but chose to add (with no evidence) that ‘temporary masts were put on her for her journey to Rotherhithe’.¹⁶ This was contracted by Butlin and Joll (1977, 1984) into the statement that the Temeraire was ‘remasted’ for her last journey, a notion echoed by other art historians, but derided by Eric Shanes (1988, 1990)¹⁷ who, having studied Liggins’s letter to better effect and combined it with the evidence of Beatson’s drawing, effectively rebutted the tradition.

By depicting the Temeraire with her three lower masts in, and partly rigged, Turner allows the ship to retain much of her dignity: but her sails are furled, and she moves with no power of her own. Her progress behind the tug is eerie, hardly displacing the water. Turner relies largely on colour to inform us that the Temeraire is in fact a doomed ship, unreal and already ghostly. Her own black and yellow paint is [page 311]nowhere visible. Through Turner’s eyes, the entire ship takes on the pale gold of a vision. Deliberately, he does not try to give distinctness to more than a few details of the ship. He defines the curves of her bows, and the catheads on either side behind which her anchors are stowed. A few dark, sketchy brushstrokes along her side are enough to indicate her lines and her now empty gun‐ports – the foremost of them open, but only to the breeze.

Turner concentrates on one specific area in the forefront of the Temeraire in which to symbolise the change which has overtaken the whole ship. A perpendicular spar (the dolphin striker), which once supported stays to carry the rigging forward, now hangs loose, its lower end broken, symbolising the destruction of the once complex and intricate system of rigging which formerly gave movement and purpose to the ship. Even more telling is the absence of the jackstaff which was once fixed to her bowsprit. The Temeraire had flown the Union flag from her jackstaff throughout her long years in harbour; E.W. Cooke’s watercolour of the Temeraire off Sheerness (fig. 1) shows it flying there. From the moment that she was sold out of the navy, the Temeraire could no longer fly the flag. Where once it flew, the acrid tug‐smoke pours. The full poignancy of the lines Turner adapted from Campbell can now be understood:
The flag which braved the battle and the breeze,
No longer owns her.Making this point was more important to Turner than accuracy over the design of the tug which tows the Temeraire. He who had regularly travelled on steamboats from the early 1820s, drawing and painting them – most dramatically in Staffa,¹⁸ exhibited 1832 – had had plenty of opportunities to observe that the basic design of all steamboats was dictated by the need to place the boiler centrally, amidships, with the funnel above it and the mast (needed for occasional auxiliary sail power) in front of the boat. But the pictorial drama of his picture demanded that the tug’s black funnel, belching fiery steam, should dominate over the doomed ship. To achieve this effect, Turner ignored all contemporary steamer designs – and all his own first‐hand observations of steamers – by placing the tug’s funnel in front of its mast. Fiery smoke can thus be seen to rise from the funnel and pour backwards in a long plume through the Temeraire’s masts. Turner’s ‘mistake’ in placing his tug’s funnel before its mast was evidently deliberate. R.C. Leslie alone recognised in it Turner’s ‘strong, almost prophetic idea of smoke, soot, iron and steam, coming to the front in all naval matters’.¹⁹ More literally minded critics mocked the tug’s construction. To Turner’s annoyance, the positions of the tug’s funnel and mast were ‘corrected’ by J.T. Willmore in his engraving of 1845. Willmore shortened Turner’s funnel and placed it well back in the tug. Turner’s long plume of fiery smoke flowing backwards to drift through the Temeraire’s masts now becomes a short burst likely to set her masts on fire.²⁰ The alteration appears to have been made without Turner’s knowledge, and to have caused him a ‘paroxysm of wrath’.²¹ When Willmore’s plate was reprinted in 1851 in The Turner Gallery, it had been silently altered. From 1851 onwards, the recorrected engraving shows the tug’s funnel foremost, as Turner had painted it.

Both the steam tugs which Beatson hired from the Thames Steam Towing Company for the tow were fairly new. Both had been built in Newcastle upon Tyne; the London, 37 tons, was completed in May 1836, and the Samson, 32 tons, was completed in February 1837.²² The fact that Turner shows only one tug towing the Temeraire adds to the improbability that he saw the tow. A white commercial flag flies from the tall mast of Turner’s tug, increasing the pathos of the Temeraire’s missing flag. By 1838, steamboats had been in operation around the kingdom for nearly twenty years, and the Thames Steam Towing Company had been operating for five years. Tugs might be new in art, but not in commerce. Turner had observed steamboats (‘remorqueurs’) working on the Seine during 1830–2 while he was collecting material for Turner’s Annual Tour – The Seine, 1834. Between Quilleboeuf and Villequier, one of the small gouache studies of steamboats navigating a safe course for sailing‐ships round a hazardous bend of the Seine, in some sense anticipates the motif of the tug towing the very much larger Temeraire.

Thackeray was to describe the Temeraire’s tug as ‘a little, spiteful, diabolical steamer’, proceeding with ‘such malignant alacrity as might befit an executioner’.²³ Turner’s own attitude to the tug may be more ambiguous. Certainly he makes as much as he can out of the contrast between the two [page 312]vessels, and the manner in which he does so means that our sympathies and his own lie with the Temeraire; but it is by no means certain that Turner himself thought of the tug as ‘spiteful’ or ‘malignant’. He may rather have seen the tug as the agent of the times: not noble, like the Temeraire, but not necessarily ignoble: like the steamer in Staffa which he had travelled on as well as painted, trailing smoke rather than clouds of glory, but nevertheless efficient, of practical use and by now a part of modern life. The tug’s black funnel may trumpet the supremacy of steam: but the colours with which Turner paints the tug are not ugly, and the fact that the sunset irradiates the tug as well as the Temeraire may suggest that the tug in its turn will be superseded.

A magnificent sunset occupies almost half the picture. In the words of the Art‐Union’s reviewer, ‘It is a glorious sunset, and we are to suppose that by the time that the glowing disk shall rest upon the horizon, the Temeraire shall have been towed into her last resting‐place.’²⁴ By Pieter van der Merwe’s and Bill Robson’s calculations, the Temeraire would have been secured in her ‘last berth’ by about 3 pm, several hours before sunset in early September. The sunset is Turner’s invention; the long rays from the sun seem to slant almost yearningly towards the Temeraire. The sunset has been variously interpreted as a symbol of the end of an era, or of departed glory, or of the inevitability of death. As the sun sets, a crescent moon appears. Many have construed this as symbolic of ‘the old order changeth, giving place to new’, though steamboats were hardly new in 1838. The simultaneous appearance in the sky of the sun and the moon had long interested Turner: it is also depicted in Modern Rome, exhibited at the same time as The Fighting Temeraire, with a quotation adapted from Byron:
The moon is up and yet it is not night
The sun as yet divides the day with her.The setting is unidentifiable, but the sunset implies that the Temeraire is nearing her last berth. In the background, Turner conjures up a mysterious effect of the masts of numerous ships receding into the far distance on either side of the path of the setting sun; Thackeray was to describe them as ‘a countless navy that fades away’. The dark prosaic shape of the buoy in the shallows on the right is indispensable in tying [page 313]the vast sunset down to the sands and bringing us back to the realisation that life must go on.

The fact that the sunset is in the wrong direction appears to have bothered nobody until James Dafforne, in a commentary on The Fighting Temeraire in 1877, detected ‘a glaring error in it, as regards the position of the sun… A ship coming up the Thames from the Nore would have her stern nearly due east: and it is in the east that Turner has made his sun to set. By no possible wearing or tacking, even if under sail, would a vessel on a river, whose course is westerly, have the setting sun behind her. But the true points of the compass occupied no place in the artist's mind when he painted his gorgeous picture.’ This sparked off a lively but inconclusive correspondence in The Times over the likely setting in Turner’s picture, the ‘true points of the compass’ and the general unreliability of artists. That Turner ‘got the sunset wrong’ has passed into the national consciousness, still prompting occasional correspondence. If Turner is to blame, it is for using a factual title for his picture which might – not unreasonably – lead literally minded viewers to expect the documentary accuracy which characterised marine painting of the period. Dafforne, who first noted the error, also offers the best extenuation of it, perceiving that ‘the true points of the compass occupied no place in the artist’s mind when he painted this gorgeous picture.’

Reviewers of the 1839 Royal Academy exhibition singled out The Fighting Temeraire for praise: most of them added their own interpretations of its meaning. The first to comment was the Morning Chronicle on 7 May: There is something in the contemplation of such a scene which affects us almost as deeply as the death of a human being. It is impossible to gaze at the remains of this magnificent and venerable vessel without recollecting, to use the words of Campbell, ‘how much she has done, and how much she has suffered for her country’. In his striking performance Mr. Turner has indulged his love of strong and powerfully‐contrasted colours with great taste and propriety. A gorgeous horizon poetically intimates that the sun of the Temeraire is setting in glory.The Spectator of 11 May began by acclaiming the picture because ‘its poetry is intelligible’ – not an adjective bestowed on any other of Turner’s 1839 exhibits – then described it as a grand image of the last days of one of Britain’s bulwarks: the huge hulk – looming vast in the distance in the midst of a faint gleam of moonlight, that invests with a halo the ghost of her former self – is towed by a steam‐boat whose fiery glow and activity and small size makes a fine contrast with the majestic stillness of the old line‐of‐battle ship, like a superannuated veteran led by a sprightly boy: the sun is setting on the opposite side of the picture, in a furnace‐like blaze of light, making the river glow with its effulgence, and typifying the departing glories of the old Temeraire. The colouring is magical…The reviewer for the Athenaeum of 11 May was so moved by the sacrificial air of the ‘doomed vessel’ as to see the tug as its executioner: A sort of sacrificial solemnity is given to the scene, by the blood‐red light cast upon the waters by the round descending sun, and by the paler gleam from the faint rising crescent moon, which silvers the majestic hull, and the towering masts, and the taper spars of the doomed vessel, gliding in the wake of the steam‐boat – which latter (still following this fanciful mode of interpretation) almost gives to the picture the expression of such malignant alacrity as might befit an executioner.More simply, and even more effectively, the Art‐Union on 15 May declared the picture to be ‘perhaps, the most wonderful of all the works of the greatest master of the age’, and called it ‘a nobly‐composed poem’. Thackeray was to liken The Fighting Temeraire to ‘a magnificent national ode or piece of music’. Thackeray contributed reviews to Fraser's Magazine in the form of mostly facetious letters; but in June 1839 his own deeply emotional response to The Fighting Temeraire quickly took over from flippancy: If you want to know what is the best picture in the room … I must request you to turn your attention to a noble river‐piece by J.M.W. Turner, Esq., R.A., ‘The Fighting Temeraire’ – as grand a picture as ever figured on the walls of any academy, or came from the easel of any painter. The old Temeraire is dragged to her last home by a little, spiteful, diabolical steamer. A mighty red sun, amidst a host of flaring clouds, sinks to rest on one side of the picture, and illumines a river that seems interminable, and a countless navy that fades away into such a wonderful distance as never was painted before. The little demon of a steamer is belching out a volume (why do I say a volume? not a hundred volumes could express it) of foul, lurid, red‐hot malignant smoke, paddling furiously, and lashing up the water round about it; while behind it (a cold gray moon looking down on it), slow, sad and majestic, follows the brave old ship, with death, as it were, written on her…Of all the picture’s contemporary critics, Thackeray most openly affirms that the painting strikes a powerfully patriotic chord. Such noble old ships, he urged, should not be sacrificed but preserved as relics for Englishmen to revere: Think of them when alive, and braving the battle and the breeze, they carried Nelson and his heroes victorious by the Cape of St. Vincent, in the dark waters of Aboukir. and through the fatal conflict of Trafalgar… We Cockneys feel our hearts leap up when we recall them to memory: and every clerk in Threadneedle Street feels the strength of a Nelson, when he thinks of the mighty actions performed by him.[page 314]It is absurd, you will say, … to grow so politically enthusiastic about a four‐foot canvass, representing a ship, a steamer, a river, and a sunset. But herein surely lies the power of the great artist. He makes you see and think of a great deal more than the objects before you.Turner had no wish to part with his ‘four‐foot canvass, representing a ship, a steamer, a river, and a sunset’. He had lent the painting (for a ‘consideration’) to the print‐publisher J. Hogarth, publisher of Willmore’s engraving, who exhibited it in his premises, 60 Great Portland Street, in September 1844. At some later date, Turner was evidently again approached for the loan (or perhaps renewal of the loan) of The Fighting Temeraire, perhaps this time by his patron Elhanan Bicknell, who was involved in financing the publication of prints. The only record of Turner’s reply is a draft of an unfinished letter, written in pencil in a small sketchbook of about 1845,²⁵ which reads: Dear SirI have receivd your note at last via Margate and am so ill that [I] despond to writeI differ most materially with you – and no consid[eratio]ns of money or favour can induce me to lend my Darling againUntil I have my 50 Proof India before the letters, we are two –Nor could Turner be persuaded to sell the picture. C.R. Leslie, who in 1845 had arranged the sale of Staffa to his fellow‐American Colonel James Lenox, records that Lenox also tried to buy The Fighting Temeraire; this was presumably in 1848, when Lenox called on Turner with the dealer Thomas Griffith and reputedly offered £5000 and, when that was refused, a blank cheque, for the picture. Leslie records that by then Turner had determined not to sell it, and that he ‘refused large offers for his “Temeraire”, because he intended to leave it to the nation’.²⁶

Meanwhile Turner’s ‘Darling’ remained in his own gallery in Queen Anne Street, frequently among the 24 or so pictures usually on display there.²⁷ Lady Trevelyan, who visited the gallery in about 1844, recalled that on faded walls hardly weather tight – and among bits of furniture thick with dust like a place that has been forsaken for years, were those brilliant pictures all glowing with sunshine and colour – glittering lagunes of Venice foaming seas and fairy sunsets, all shining out of the dirt and neglect as if they were endless – the great Carthage at one end of the room – and the glorious Temeraire lighting up another corner – & Turner himself careless & kind and queer to look upon… The Man & the place were so strange and so touching no one cd forget who had ever seen & felt it.²⁸Lady Eastlake also saw the picture hanging there in 1846, noting ‘The Temeraire a grand sunset effect…’.²⁹ Two of the three memorial pictures of Turner’s gallery, painted perhaps a year after Turner's death by George Jones RA , his old friend and one of his executors, include The Fighting Temeraire.³⁰ In Lady Visitors in Turner’s Gallery, the picture is shown propped against the left wall of the gallery, with The Tenth Plague of Egypt hanging above it, and in Turner’s Body in his Coffin in his Gallery, a view from the opposite end, The Fighting Temeraire is on the right, next to a chair.

The Fighting Temeraire was among the first paintings in the Turner Bequest to be hung. Turner’s painting spread the fame of the Temeraire beyond the chronicles of naval history. In Turner’s lifetime, it had inspired a sonnet (by Richard Monckton Milnes MP).³¹ In 1857, the first year in which it went on public view, it inspired a rousing ballad by J. Duff,³² set to music by J.W. Hobbs, which remained popular throughout the century. In that year, the American novelist and poet Herman Melville (author of Moby‐Dick, 1851) was in London, and studied the Turners on view in Marlborough House, The Fighting Temeraire among them. In 1866 he published a poem entitled The Temeraire³³ which, alone among Temeraire poems, conveys the sense of time overtaking the old wooden ships.
O, Titan Temeraire,
Your stern‐lights fade away:
Your bulwarks to the years must yield,
And heart‐of‐oak decay.
A pigmy steam‐tug tows you,
Gigantic, to the shore –
Dismantled of your guns and spars,
And sweeping wings of war.
The rivets clinch the iron‐clads,
Men learn a deadlier lore;
But Fame has nailed your battle‐flags –
Your ghost it sails before
O, the navies old and oaken,
O, the Temeraire no more!Sir Henry Newbolt’s better‐known The Fighting Temeraire by contrast relies on jingling rhythms. It was twice set to music, by Florian Pascal in 1911 and by Granville Bantock in 1940, in a still popular version.³⁴

Notes