What's the story behind Turner's 'The Fighting Temeraire'? | National Gallery

Today I'm going to talk to you about the Fighting Temeraire by Joseph Mallord William Turner, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1839, a moment in fact when the Royal Academy and the National Gallery occupied the same site to the north of what would soon become Trafalgar Square. When Turner exhibited this painting he actually gave it a much longer title than the Fighting Temeraire and the full title is The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her Last Birth So it's very specific, it suggests something that actually happened and it did. The Temeraire, which was a warship then 40 years old, was towed up the Thames to be broken up at Rotherhithe because it was no longer of use to the Royal Navy. However the reason why people were so excited by this painting, not just by Turner who was the most exciting landscape artist in Britain during this period, but also because it combined a wonderful combination of the poetic, the patriotic, but also the idea of an event that really spoke to people's idea of national and world history. By this point in his career Turner was the unrivaled landscape artist, indeed one might even say an unrivaled painter. He was in his 60s, he was well established, a much revered academician, he had a long career, a very successful one, financially successful. He was able to both please the crowd, which undoubtedly did with the Fighting Temeraire, and also test people's limits in terms of what they thought picture making or art was actually about. And indeed the painting three years later after the Fighting Temeraire, and that is Snowstorm Steamboat of a Harbour's Mouth, which like the Fighting Temeraire also focuses on a steamboat, was absolutely vilified by most people at the Royal Academy. And Turner did have this ability to really chop and change between the crowd pleasing and things that were really provoking to his audiences. But the Temeraire undoubtedly from the get-go was one of his most popular works, alongside in fact his Venetian scenes of a similar period. These were critically acclaimed. The Fighting Temeraire as an image is a very important marker in the history of British representation of the Napoleonic War period, but also the most famous naval victory of that war, the Battle of Trafalgar of 1805. Up till 1839 there had been many, many representations of the actual battle itself, and also above everything else, the sacrifice that was made by the Admiral of the Fleet, Horatio Nelson, who had actually died during the battle itself. So not only did he secure victory, and a victory that really did turn the tables on the war itself, and certainly French and Napoleon's ambitions in terms of defeat within Europe, but also allowed the British to really make their marker as the preeminent nation, indeed imperial ambitions as well, going forward across the period. We really don't understand in the 21st century how popular and central the Navy was to the everyday lives of Britons. When a ship was launched on behalf of the Royal Navy, thousands of people turned up to watch it being launched, and the same is true of those ships that were being broken up, and the Temeraire is an absolute example of that. What the painting represents is not just the sacrifice, if you like, of the actual ship itself, which is about to be broken up after all that service and duty that it seems to encapsulate, also the people who had died and were injured during the battle itself, which ran into thousands, but also specifically the sacrifice made of the admiral in command of the fleet, Nelson, who gave the ultimate sacrifice of dying during the battle. So the Battle of Trafalgar itself represented a very potent mix of victory and sacrifice, all of which is represented in the fighting Temeraire, particularly with the burning blood-red sunset that seems to represent both the passage of time and the beginning and end, for example, of the Age of Sail and the advent of the Age of Steam, but also the idea of what happened during the battle itself, which Turner actually described as gory Trafalgar, so everyone knew it was a battle that had seen a lot of bloodshed and sacrifice. And I think that also explains why Turner decided to create a very distinct contrast between the Temeraire as a warship and the steamship itself in terms of white and black, to create the contrast between the two, but also to suggest the death of the Temeraire and the end of an age through the idea of it being a ghost ship as it sails up the Thames. Of course it can't sail up the Thames by itself, it has to be tugged along by a much smaller boat which is actually driven by steam, so in and of itself the Age of Sail is being taken over by the Age of Steam between the contrast of the large ship and the small ship, and that in itself I think is very emblematic of the changing from the Age of Sail to the Age of Steam. So I think the idea of ghostly is actually again represented in the background of the painting, certainly to left and right of the actual sun as it sets, because you see the ghostly white mass of the ships that again suggests a ghost fleet, the age that has gone but also the loss of the ships and the loss of the men during the Battle of Trafalgar itself, which again is very emblematic of what Turner is trying to say with this particular work of art. And then you have this very black boy on the right-hand side in the foreground, which has often been interpreted as a symbol of death. So these contrasts that Turner creates within the painting is not just between the white Temeraire and the black steamship, but also between the light. On the left-hand side we see the rising moon and the cool light that it's shedding as it were over the Temeraire itself, and on the right-hand side the heat, the warmth of the setting sun, and that contrast between the lovely blues and whites on the left of the painting and the hot colours on the right again set up, I think, a real tension in terms of what the painting is representing. And of course the burning sunset is reflected in the Thames itself, and then you have these wonderful contrasts between black and white, where the ships, boys, steamships and so on, which creates again this idea of contrast. So when the Temeraire was a fully commissioned and operational warship, it would have flown flags, particularly the Union flag and also the Royal Naval Ensign, and then during the battle very famously flags were flown that signalled a message, England expects that every man will do his duty, was actually flown from Nelson's flagship HMS Victory. So flags were a very important feature and sort of identity of warships. Now here of course the Temeraire has been entirely stripped of that identification, and indeed interestingly the steamboat actually has its white flag as a commercial service, so it sort of signals perhaps the loss of the flags and status therefore of the Temeraire. And this is important because Turner flagged that loss in the poetry that he appended in the catalogue at the Royal Academy, and this is in adapted lines from Thomas Campbell's poem, Ye Mariners of England. So this is what was put into the catalogue, the flag which braved the battle and the breeze no longer owns her. So it's almost as if in a very poetic way the Temeraire had been abandoned by the Royal Navy and perhaps abandoned by the British people, and hence perhaps the sense of loss that the fighting Temeraire seems to represent, but also perhaps provoking his first audiences to remember not just the service of the Temeraire but also those who had died and were injured during that particular battle. It's almost a memorial I suppose to those who had fought in the battle itself. Broadly speaking, Turner in the fighting Temeraire is engaging yet again, as he did throughout his career, with a kind of scene associated with the great 17th century French classicist Claude Lorraine. It is in essence a harbour scene or a riverfront scene, but this time transposed of course to London rather than some classical idol. Now in 1824 when the National Gallery was founded there was an acquisition from the John Julius Angerstein private collection that included not one, not two, but three Claudian seaports, and this is something that Turner absolutely has in his mind but freshened up, made modern. The great thing about Turner and the thing he really nailed his colours to this particular mast was that he was the great moderniser of the old master tradition. So yet again with an event that had only happened the year before in 1838, he treats something that's contemporary and historical and very particular to Britain, but in such a way to indicate his knowledge and understanding of the old master tradition. But actually I think importantly perhaps even to say that he's not just the Claude of his age, he has gone beyond Claude to really reinvent that tradition which was so revered at the time. And one work of art in particular that actually could almost be the pair to the Fighting Temeraire in terms of what it shows, but also this idea of the poetic and elegiac, is Keelman heaving in coals by moonlight, which is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which was actually painted only a few years before the Fighting Temeraire, and that really does show the great poetic potential of the industrial heartlands, using the likes of Claude Lorraine to elevate the scene, as indeed Turner does in the Fighting Temeraire, to elevate something that seems to be everyday perhaps to us, and certainly would have been perhaps for people working on the River Thames or indeed the Tyne, but actually elevating it to something that's high art. So in the 1820s, in his first will of 1829, Turner was already thinking about how to insert himself into the great narrative of Western painting as represented by the newly founded National Gallery, and he decides in his will to donate two of his paintings to be displayed alongside two works by Claude Lorraine, and then as his thoughts develop over the period and certainly into the 1830s when the Fighting Temeraire is exhibited, he's thinking even bigger. He's going to donate all the finished works in his studio, which at that stage of course post-1839 includes the Fighting Temeraire, because he knew that actually the way to build a reputation is to have a very public representation, a very public collection exhibiting your works to the public, and I think that's why certainly Turner is now deemed to be the greatest of British painters, but also why he's so central I think in terms of the British psychology, and why I think the Fighting Temeraire seems continually to be seen by people as their favourite Turner, if not their favourite work of art at the National Gallery, and indeed it was voted the nation's favourite in 2005 with a BBC poll. Personally the reason why I absolutely love the Fighting Temeraire is not just what it represents as a painting, in terms of its symbolism, its poetics, its narrative, which is absolutely supreme, and showing Turner absolutely on top of his game in the way that he could create a work of art that really was a zeitgeist image, something that really chimed with the society that he lived in. In this painting I do feel that there's something very emotional, very personal, and something about Turner himself, who I think was a very emotional person as well as someone who was very savvy, and I think essentially what you have in a work of art like this is, if you strip away the narrative, ignore the event that it wants to represent and so on, is a painting by an artist who is absolutely supreme in his colour management, someone who is using colour in a very innovative, surprising, challenging way, and really pushing the boundaries of picture making in a way that there really was no one else at the time doing this kind of work.