A ship’s last voyage is eulogised by Turner in oil and canvas
5–6 SEPTEMBER 1838
ÒA s grand a picture as ever figured on the walls of any academy, or came from the easel of any painter.” Such was one response to JMW Turner’s masterpiece The Fighting Temeraire when it was displayed at London’s Royal Academy in 1839. This work differed from Turner’s other maritime paintings, encapsulating a moment of calm, reflection and finality, showing the great warship being tugged to her last berth to be broken up.
Launched in 1798, Temeraire was a 98-gun ship of the line that had become famed for the decisive role it played in the battle of Trafalgar. Following the end of the Napoleonic Wars, though, such warships were largely redundant, and since 1820 she had been moored off Sheerness at the mouth of the Thames. Finally, in June 1838, the Admiralty ordered that she be sold off for scrap. So it was that, in early September, she was towed upstream to Rotherhithe to be broken up and her timbers salvaged.
Though Turner probably didn’t witness the moment in person, he was aware of the ship’s last voyage, which was widely broadcast in newspapers. His eulogy to the Temeraire depicts a magnificent vessel bathed in the embers of a setting sun, the Thames painted in deep oranges and reds. The once-mighty ship is already half-lost to history – ethereal and ghostly, almost transparent on her last voyag
