J.M.W. Turner, "The Fighting Temeraire" tugged to her last Berth to be Broken up, 1838. Before 1839. Oil on Canvas. 90.8 cm high by 121.9 cm wide. National Gallery, London. [Number 524, Turner Bequest, 1856]. Compare a photograph of a similar scene from the last decade of the nineteenth century. — George P. Landow
Commentary
The Temeraire was the famous ship which had played such a memorable role during the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. It came to the rescue of Nelson's beleaguered flagship Victory, and avenged Nelson's death by blowing up the Redoutable, the French ship from which the fatal bullet had been fired. As Michael Wood says, the battleship's last voyage, when it was towed to the wrecker's yard, was also deeply significant:
Set against a molten sunset, the white and gold hull of the Temeraire, hero of the Battle of Trafalgar, gleams iridescently against the dark, grimy tug that pulls her to her ignoble destiny. A simple, relatively prosaic event from real life has become an epic vision describing the forces of good and evil, war and peace, life and death, heroism and destiny. Perhaps ironic to those who witnessed it, the episode became in the hands of Turner a moment of grand emotion, with patriotic and historic overtones. [Wood 225]
What Turner was memorializing here was the end of the age of sail itself
But there is even more to the painting than that. Writing in connection with the 250th anniversary of Turner's birth on 23 April 2025, Matt Wilson wrote of this celebrated painting:
Frequently it's been accepted as a melancholy image, a forlorn lament for past glories and a lost way of life. But this misses its essential point. The Fighting Temeraire is really about transformation and the inevitability of change rather than nostalgia. The most important lessons to learn from The Fighting Temeraire are about Turner's attitude and outlook. It embodies his refusal to be daunted by newness or enslaved by traditional artistic values. His quest to find the beauty and grandeur of modern experience, and leave the past behind, is magnificently on display in The Fighting Temeraire. And these qualities are truly his lasting legacy to modern art.
Turner's vision of the future is embodied here in that "dark, grimy tug" towing the old battleship. But he would celebrate the new industrial age more positively, and much more dynamically, in another well-known painting, Rain, Steam and Speed — The Great Western Railway (1844). — Philip Allingham.
Bibliography
Landow, George. [Ruskin's discussion of the painting] The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.
Ruskin, John. Works, "The Library Edition." eds. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. 39 vols. London: George Allen, 1903-1912.
Wilson, Matt. "The Fighting Temeraire: Why J.M.W. Turner's greatest painting is so misunderstood." BBC Culture. 16 April 2025. https://www.bbc.co.uk/culture/article/20250415-jmw-turner-at-250-why-his-greatest-painting-the-fighting-temeraire-is-so-misunderstood.
Wood, Michael. Chapter 12, "Art as Emotion: The First Half of the Nineteenth Century." Art of the Western World. Summit Books. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989. 213-234.
Created 27 April 2021
Last modified 23 April 2025