The Fighting Temeraire By Turner

One summer evening in 1838, Joseph Turner, the famous British painter, was a passenger on a steamer chugging along the Thames from Margate to London. Standing along the rail, the painter watched the warship Temeraire. The 98 gun veteran warship was not an ordinary one. It had taken part in the Battle of Trafalgar, the battle in which two most powerful fleets in the world, Britannia and Bonaparte, had engaged to establish their supremacy in the sea. The British naval force had won the greatest battle in British naval history but at the cost of thousands of lives of British soldiers, and England's brightest son Vice Admiral Lord Nelson. The painter was impressed; patriotic sentiment aroused at the sight of the Temeraire. This was the warship which avenged the death of Nelson! Turner rapidly made a number of little sketches on card. In 1839, he exhibited the ‘Fighting Temeraire’ at the Royal Academy.From the day of its first exhibition, the ‘Fighting Temeraire’ has been Turner’s most popular painting. It exhibits Turner’s mingling of pictorial splendor with patriotic sentiment. The picture shows the Temeraire being towed up the Thames to a breaker’s yard. The ship in full sail in the background symbolizes the Temeraire’s own days of glory while the black buoy looming in the foreground suggests the finality of the Battle of Trafalgar, the melancholy journey. The silver white of the ship endows a ghostly majesty to it while the black tug symbolizes evil. The blazing sunset in the picture indicates an era coming to its end and bloodshed as well. In 1939, the Morning Chronicle described this painting as ‘the Sun of the Temeraire is setting in Glory’. The famous English novelist William Thackeray compared the effect of this picture with a performance of ‘God Save the Queen” to evoke enthusiasm of both public and critics.