Turner： Painting The Fighting Temeraire ｜ National Gallery

Hello ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the National Gallery. My name is Matthew, Matthew Morgan, I work here in the Education Department and I am incredibly lucky to have the opportunity next half an hour to talk to you about this remarkable painting, not only by one of my favourite artists ever of all time anywhere, J.M.W. Turner, but in my view one of his most intriguing, fascinating and all-round amazing paintings. It's a painting that I think is very well known, perhaps lots of you recognise it and know it and have looked at it many times, but hopefully by the time I'm finished I will have revealed some things about it that you've either never noticed, never seen before or never thought about before. Turner, born not very far from where we are now, born in Covent Garden, sometimes described as a cockney, couldn't possibly be a cockney not born within the sound of Bow Bells, but it's a way I think for particularly his contemporaries to place him, place him as a working class person, a person who didn't come from a very privileged background. His father was a wig maker and barber, but Turner was something of a child prodigy, not something of a child prodigy, he was a child prodigy. He received his first payment for an art project at the age of 11 when he was paid to colour in prints, he exhibited his first watercolour at the Royal Academy at the age of 15, just 15, think what you were doing when you were 15. I certainly wasn't exhibiting at the Royal Academy and he became a full member of the Royal Academy at the exceptionally young age of 27, so he was an amazing young Turk I suppose we might say of the British art scene, however by the time we come to this painting Turner was an old man, he was in fact I think 64 when this painting was painted and his career had progressed very much further than the painter of landscapes and marine scenes that he had started off by being. He made his name largely, in some ways, as a painter of marine scenes and we have a couple here, really fantastic, dramatic, amazing views of boats on the sea and throughout his life Turner never forgot that marine painting was an integral part of his oeuvre. He painted all sorts of ships all around Britain, around the coast of Britain and into France, Italy, his scenes of Venice, you very often see ships there. He knew about ships and shipping, in fact there's a fantastic story that he was staying with one of his patrons, Sir Walter Fawkes, and he was asked by his children to paint a watercolour and he took a piece of paper and just started painting and they looked at him and they couldn't see what he was doing, he seemed to be just pushing the paint around on this piece of paper but out of it emerged this fantastic watercolour which we still have of a Royal Navy ship, a ship of the line, which he had painted from his memory, entirely from his own memory. Turner knew his ships, which brings me very neatly to the painting in question. What do we have here? Well of course we have a ship in the background, this gigantic ship gliding almost along the water, very high in the water, gliding towards us, a pale yellow colour, a very ghostly colour, almost a green in some places on the painting, drifting towards us out of the corner, surrounding the ship in the sky are these clouds, these purple clouds, almost a bruised sky and in some ways when I look at this painting I think of this ship coming out of the clouds towards us, there's nobody on it, it's completely empty, it is a Marie Celeste almost of ships, it doesn't need any people at this stage because it's being towed, being towed by this dark ship or dark boat in front, this tug pulling it along, the tug, it's smoke coming out, covering the front of the ship behind but pulling us and we can see beautifully painted, a fabulous piece of painting by Turner, its wheels turning the water, it's working very hard to pull this gigantic ship. On the other side of the painting though we have this absolutely remarkable gorgeous sun, limpidly hanging, an almost pink colour but the sky lit by the sun, how dramatic, how beautiful, how wonderful, how bright, can you see these colours, these yellows, Turner very much a fan of yellow, criticised by a lot of his contemporaries, criticised by a lot of contemporary critics for using yellow, often accused of painting with mustard but look at that yellow, not mustard at all, I think this is absolutely gorgeous and beautiful and pinks and reds and purples, what a dramatic sun, dramatic colours in the sky, the sun is also casting its light on the water here, now we know this is water because obviously these are ships but if you were just to have a blow up of this bit I'd challenge anybody to know that this is water, look at the colours, none of the colours that one associates with water here, no blues, very few whites, hardly even any greys, over here we have a more conventional painting of water but here Turner is showing us the colour and the brightness and the effects of light on water, something for which he was by this stage already very famous for or very well known for as a painter of light, as a painter of light on water. Behind this large ship there are other ships stretching into the distance, can you see them here going all the way back and maybe you can't see it out there but do have a closer look, here we have another tug pulling along, we are on the Thames and the Thames at this point was a busy, packed, working river, it was not like it is today, quiet, full of people rowing and that sort of stuff, it was noisy, it was dirty, it was filthy, it was like a motorway and Turner is showing us this by showing all of these ships on here, particularly this one I think behind the tug and it looks to me as though the tug is slightly pushing him out of the way, out of the way I'm putting this big boat and some of those ships go better move, don't want to be sunk. Turner tells us what this boat is, who this boat is because in some ways this painting is like a portrait, and just like a portrait if you know who the sitter is it adds to your knowledge of what's going on, so too if we know what this ship is or who this ship is it adds to our knowledge because it isn't just any ship, Turner isn't just showing us a scene on a river, he's showing us a particular scene at a particular time, this ship is the Temeraire, Turner chose to call it the Fighting Temeraire, it was a hero ship, it was a ship that had served in the Battle of Trafalgar, the Battle of Trafalgar, a huge naval battle between the British and the French, in which the British had defeated the French navy, defeated the French and Spanish joint navy and had wrestled control of the sea, particularly around the Mediterranean, the French were never able to get such a large naval contingent again after the battle, and the Temeraire was well known for having been right in the thick of the fighting, it had saved Nelson's flagship, the Victory, from attack, it had captured not one but two enemy vessels which it lashed to its sides throughout the battle, and if you ever see any other paintings of the Battle of Trafalgar you will very often see the Temeraire depicted because it was so close to the Victory, so this isn't just any ship, this is a ship with a history, this is a ship that has achieved great things, however after the Battle of Trafalgar it never saw action again, after it had been a hero ship that was the end of its story of fighting, after that it still was in service but it spent most of the rest of its life semi-permanently moored off Sheerness as a supply ship, you can see how large it is, I wonder how many supplies they managed to cram into it, and there it remained until the Royal Navy decided that it had come to the end of its life, they no longer needed it, however a ship like this you don't just sink it and say well we have done with it, it's a major expensive piece of equipment, the Navy did what it actually had done with almost all of the ships that had fought in Trafalgar by this stage and will continue to do to all of them save the Victory, which is it sold them and it sold them for scrap, it is said that the Temeraire required 5,000 oak trees to be built, just think for a moment about a forest of 5,000 oak trees run into one ship, now you're not going to just throw that away, just think about the countless nails needed to attach the 5,000 oak trees together, you're not going to just throw those away either, so the Navy sold the Temeraire and here it is as Turner tells us being towed to its last berth, being towed to the breaker's yard where it would be disintegrated and reused for all sorts of other things, so this is a painting of the last moments of a hero ship and I think we are expected to feel a particular way about this, I think what Turner is doing here is he's using all of his considerable skills to play with our emotions, to make us feel what he wants us to feel look at this sun, the sun is setting isn't it, it's going down, sunset a symbol for the end of the day the end of day coming down and perhaps you might not have noticed up here in this corner is the moon coming up, so the day is finishing, the moon is coming up, the hero ship ghostly, empty, gliding along, pulled by this tug, this modern steam-powered ugly looking thing, that's exactly how almost all of the commentators who saw it when it was first exhibited in 1839 read this painting that was exhibited here in the National Gallery, we shared our space with the Royal Academy at that time, almost all of the contemporary reviews of this painting read it in that way, that this is an elegy to this ship that is dying, this hero ship that is being ignominiously pulled and then going to be ripped literally limb from limb, there's something to be said about that I think, and if you look a little bit closer you can see all sorts of other little clues that that might be what Turner intended, so if we see the smoke from the tug billowing over the Temeraire we can see that it is over this pit here, this dolphin's berth, the front of the ship where the jack star, the flag of the Royal Navy would have hung, but of course there's nothing there because it doesn't belong to the Royal Navy anymore, it's been sold and more than that, that's now covered by this dirty smoke, smoke that's almost alive with flame itself, we can also see perhaps there's white flag here at the top, can you see that tiny little flag at the top of the mast of the tug indicating again that the Temeraire is no longer in the Royal Navy and is in fact being pulled along by a merchant ship, so it's a sad painting, well maybe, perhaps it is sad, but one of the things that I love most about Turner is that it's not always easy to guess what he meant, in fact as he progressed in his career he almost completely moved away from putting literal meanings and interpretations in his painting, he liked to make his paintings a bit confusing, a bit difficult to read, a bit difficult to say well it's all about this or all about that, they're challenging, they're challenging for the intellect as well as sometimes challenging aesthetically, so if we spend a moment looking at the tug, as I say Turner's contemporaries said that this tug was nasty and dark, Turner spent a long time drawing tugs, painting tugs, in fact the first example of him drawing a tug in one of his sketchbooks is in 1815, quite some time before this, and he continued to draw steamboats and steam tugs. In about the middle of the 1820s they start to appear in his watercolours as well and prior to painting the fighting Temeraire, Turner had spent a summer in France in French rivers drawing tugs, drawing all sorts of vessels in French waterways, intending to turn them into prints which would be used for a print book of French rivers, so he had lots of experience of tugs, lots of experience of steamboats and he knew them well and we've got no real evidence that he didn't like them, in fact lots of his paintings and drawings seem to indicate that he was very interested in them, we know that he used them extensively around Britain and around the continent so he clearly wasn't above getting into something like this, he at this point was very often going down to Margate and Margate was serviced by steam vessels and we know that he took those, so he perhaps isn't quite so anti-tug as some of his contemporaries thought that he might be, or anti-steamboat as his contemporaries thought he might be. However again this uncertainty, difficult to pin down because if we look at the tug, the steamboat and we look a little bit below it, look at the reflection of the tug and then look at the front of the Temeraire, I hope you can see that they are surprisingly similar, surprisingly similar in shape and size. Is Turner indicating that the tug is about to replace the sailing boat or has perhaps already replaced the sailing boat? Is this in fact, Turner say, steam? This is the future, sail back to the past. Let's have a look at the sun over here, lighting the tug, lighting the steamboat, you can see the bright effect of the sun on its front, it doesn't touch the Temeraire at all. The Temeraire maintains this yellow glow of its own. Again are we expected to connect the tug to the sun, saying yes this is bright, this is the future? I don't know why I find it so fascinating. The Temeraire as I say was a hulk ship, a storage ship off the coast of Sienaise. When it was sold by the navy it had already had its masts cut down, didn't need its masts very much and after the navy sold it they went through and took out anything that they could use. They took out all the rigging, all the guns obviously, all the stores and all the masts. Fascinatingly described as being pulled out like teeth from a mouth, very painful. So what are we looking at here? Well we can't possibly be looking at the ship as it really was. However there are lots of reports of Turner being witness to this event, watching it, seeing it, drawing it. One of the ones I like best is that Turner and some of his friends go down to Greenwich for a meal and on the way back they see this boat and one of Turner's friends, a marine artist called Clarkson Stanfield says to Turner, wow look at that, that would make a great picture. Now just for a moment imagine that you're sat next to one of the greatest artists of your generation and you're an artist yourself. I find it very unlikely that you would see a scene like that and suggest it to him. You'd think oh I'm going to paint that before he gets in there. Clarkson Stanfield denied this ever happened. Turner never said that he saw this ship, he never said that he saw the Temeraire being towed. But there's something about this painting that I think is crying out for us to address whether this is an eyewitness account, to think about is this actually the way the ship really was and partly that's because Turner tells us this is a specific ship. We don't know where Turner was at this time, none of his sketchbooks have any sketches at this period, he didn't attend a meeting of the Royal Academy at this time, we don't actually have any records of him being anywhere. He could have been in the UK, he could have been in London, he could have been on the continent, we just don't know. Was he sick? Was he at home? Again no evidence. So it is possible that he saw this but if he did see it, if he was there, then this cannot be how the Temeraire looked to him. These masks cannot have been there, this rigging cannot have been there. So if Turner did see it that is not what he thought. Interestingly Turner owned an inn, a pub in Wapping, not very far from Rotherhithe where the Temeraire was broken up. Turner owned lots of property around London and if he had ever gone to this pub, the ship and a broad blade, I think it's called bone blade in fact, he could have seen the Temeraire in the breaker's yard being broken up and I like to think that that's how he knew about this story, is that he saw the ship and he immediately connected to it, connected to its story and wondered about it coming down the river. Turner playing a bit fast and loose with the facts. We know for instance that there were two steam tugs, here we only have one, there is another one as I mentioned all the way over here but that wouldn't be much good for towing a boat. Imagine that you have this gigantic ship and you are towing it down the Thames, a Thames that's already full of lots of other ships. You're going to need some help, it cannot do anything itself, it is dead in the water. So you have a tug at the front and a tug at the back which is pulling it slightly. Turner doesn't show that, perhaps the other tug is all the way over there, we don't know but I don't think he's terribly interested in showing the veracity of how gigantic ships are tugged down rivers, I think he's interested in showing us the emotions, the emotional impact and content of what's going on. Some years after this painting was exhibited somebody also noticed a small factual inaccuracy with it. If you think about your geography, if you think about where the Thames meets the sea and think about where London is, this sun could not possibly be a sunset because this sun, if it was where it's supposed to be, is in the east so this is a sunrise. So suddenly this painting takes on a completely different aspect. Is this a sunrise? Is Turner saying well this is the end of this ghost ship and hooray for steam, steam is coming forward, we are going to now have a steam future? I think that Turner knew which side of the world the sun rose and the sun set, I think Turner knew where he was adding bits to the temeraire. Turner understood exactly what he was doing. He had painted many suns, Ulysses deriding Polyphenus as a fantastic sunrise and he clearly spent many, many, many hours looking at whether features the sun particularly and this sun I'm certain we are intended to engage with directly, the way in which Turner has painted the impasto of the paint put on, you can almost feel the physical action of Turner pushing the paint onto the canvas, absolutely remarkable, absolutely gorgeous particularly here. The sun is as much a part of this painting, as much a key player I think in the way we are expected to read it as this ship. Turner isn't here trying to tell us about what actually happened, he's not interested in saying I stood on this spot and I saw this event. Turner is trying to tell us how to feel, he's trying to evoke an emotional response in this event, he is playing with our emotions perhaps we might say. We think this must be real because it's a real ship, it really existed and this really did happen but we don't imagine that he genuinely saw Ulysses deriding Polyphemus, that doesn't bother us whether he was actually there and really saw it, it's a product of his imagination and that is okay. We struggle to imagine this is a product of Turner's imagination, just I suppose as we might struggle if we were told that the portrait painter had never seen the sitter that they were painting. However, Turner's not interested in getting us to connect to being on the banks of the Thames and seeing this ship. Turner's trying to convey something deeper and that's one of the reasons I love this painting because what is Turner trying to convey? Well, maybe he is genuinely sad about the demise of this amazing ship. If you've ever seen portrait paintings rather of the final moments of Nelson, particularly there's one by Arthur Deavis, there's another one by Benjamin West and Nelson is very often shown surrounded by dark figures and he's very often lit, almost glowing. Is Turner connecting his painting to that of Nelson, the last moments of Nelson? Is he saying it is wrong of us to be just throwing away these hero ships? Today we live in a world where preservation, particularly in this country, preservation is very big. We don't tend to throw things away but we anthropomorphize this ship, don't we? Just like a sitter in a portrait, we connect to it but really it's just a hunk of wood. It has no feelings, it is nothing except a tool, a very large complex tool but it is a tool. Turner is making us think beyond that, making us think of it almost like a person. Turner might be talking about the end of empire. Turner was very concerned about the British empire, very concerned about the British empire in the world. Is Turner saying that this is the end of the empire? This is the end of the British empire. After this it's all going to go wrong. One last thing to think about, I've looked at this tug quite a lot. If you ever get a chance to look at portraits of Turner himself, I think very often he looks a bit like this tug. He is short and squat and he often wears a top hat and I can't but help but imagine that somewhere in Turner, with his working class background, his love of Britain, his love of the working people of Britain, somewhere in there he is actually pleased that this tug still exists. Thank you very much indeed.