The Fighting Temeraire

The end of an age is rarely sealed by those who fought to keep it. More often it is sealed by a witness who arrives late and stands on the bank, sketchbook in pocket, and recognises that what is passing in front of him will not pass again. The hinge of a century can hang on a single afternoon's looking, and on whether the man looking has the eye to know what he sees.

THE PAINTER AT SIXTY-THREE

Joseph Mallord William Turner was born on the twenty-third of April 1775 above his father's barber-shop at 21 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden. His mother Mary Marshall went into Bethlem in 1799 and died there in 1804; he never spoke of it. He entered the Royal Academy Schools at fourteen, the youngest of his intake, and was elected Royal Academician at twenty-seven, the youngest of his generation. By 1807 he held the chair of Professor of Perspective. By 1838 he was the senior English landscape and marine painter alive, a stout man in a long coat who haunted the wharves and packet-boats of the southern coast with a notebook in his pocket and a habit of saying little. He had painted Trafalgar twice already, once for George IV and once for himself, and had not been satisfied. He had been waiting, without yet knowing it, for the ship to come to him.

THE FIFTH OF SEPTEMBER

The afternoon was a quiet one on the Thames, with the haze of low water on the Surrey shore and a light off the river of the kind he had taught his pupils to call the painter's hour. The tow had left Sheerness on the Medway at dawn and crawled westward up the estuary with the flood, two paddle-tugs of the General Steam Navigation Company in harness, their funnels blackening the September sky. Behind them, masts stepped but yards and rigging stripped, came the ninety-eight-gun second-rate HMS Temeraire: twenty-three years a hulk at Sheerness, fifteen of them a stationary receiving-ship, condemned in the spring of 1838 and sold at Admiralty auction to John Beatson of Rotherhithe for five thousand five hundred and thirty pounds. The waterfront from Greenwich up to the breakers' wharf was thick with people. Turner stood among them on the south bank near the Hospital, the Margate to Dover sketchbook in his coat-pocket, and watched her come.

A SECOND ON THE BANK

He had, by his own later count, twenty minutes of useful light. The waterman beside him said the tugs were making four knots against the tide; the ship behind them was the body of the country's memory, the second in Nelson's weather column at Trafalgar on the twenty-first of October 1805, immediately astern of Victory, the ship that had taken the surrender of the French Redoutable and the Spanish San Justo in the action that killed the admiral. That is the ship the public sees when it thinks of Trafalgar, he thought, not the Victory at Portsmouth. The tugs were the new thing, iron and coal and paddle, and they were towing the old thing to be unmade for its timber. A marine painter of the older school would have drawn the tow as a tow. He saw at once that the picture was not the tow. The picture was the two ages held in one light, the wooden wall and the iron tug, the spectre and the apparatus, and the sun going down behind them on the right-hand side of the canvas though the geography of the river required it on the left. He would move the sun. He would move the masts back onto her. He would paint her white as a ghost and the tug black as a coal-scuttle. He sketched on for another forty minutes; the page is in the Turner Bequest, three pencil studies on a single octavo leaf, and shows the tugs ahead and the great hulk behind, and a horizon line drawn twice as if he were already arguing with it.

THE STUDIO AT QUEEN ANNE STREET

He went back that evening to 47 Queen Anne Street in Marylebone, to the gallery he had built himself and kept locked against most of London, and within the week had a primed canvas of ninety by a hundred and twenty-two centimetres on the easel. He worked at it through the winter. He gave her every mast and yard she had carried at Trafalgar, though she had been towed up the river bare; he set the sun in the west where the eye wanted it, not where the compass put it; he glazed her side until she stood pale and tall as a memory and let the tug ahead of her smoke like an industrial furnace. He attached two lines to the catalogue when he sent her to the Academy in May 1839, lifted from Thomas Campbell's Ye Mariners of England and altered to his own ear: The flag which braved the battle and the breeze, / No longer owns her. The reviewers, the Athenaeum and the Times and the young John Ruskin not yet thirty, were almost uniformly admiring. Thackeray, writing as Michael Angelo Titmarsh in Fraser's, called it as grand a painting as ever figured on the walls of any academy. The collector William Wells offered him a thousand guineas for the canvas in 1844. The publisher Henry Graves offered to engrave it. Vernon offered. The National Gallery purchase fund made enquiries. He refused them all.

THE REFUSAL

He kept her. That was the whole of it. He had painted, in his time, for patrons and for the trade and for the wall above an Academy fireplace; he had taken commissions from kings and from cotton-merchants and had been paid handsomely and had pocketed the money without sentiment. This one he would not sell. He called her, in the studio, my Darling, and would not have her engraved because the burin could not carry what he had put into the white of her hull. He was not a man given to declarations. He let the picture do the declaring. He drew up his will in 1829 and revised it through codicils until the last in 1851, and left the entire contents of the studio, some two hundred and eighty-five oils and thirty thousand drawings and watercolours, to the British nation, on the condition that the Temeraire and the Sun rising through Vapour should hang between two Claudes in the National Gallery, where the eye could measure him against the master he had measured himself against all his life. He died on the nineteenth of December 1851 at the rented cottage at 119 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, seventy-six years old, under the name of Booth, looking at the river.

THE NATION'S WALL

The Temeraire herself was broken up at Beatson's yard through the autumn and winter of 1838 and into 1839. Her timbers became furniture and panelling and at least two altar tables, one of which stands today in the parish church of St Mary at Rotherhithe within sight of the wharf where she was unmade. The painting that took her name entered the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square in 1856 and has hung there continuously since, through two world wars and a removal to a Welsh slate quarry for the duration of one of them. In the 2005 BBC Today programme poll she was voted the greatest painting in Britain, ahead of Constable and Holbein. In 2020 the Bank of England put Turner's face on the reverse of the twenty-pound note and the Fighting Temeraire behind him, so that the painting travels now in every pocket in the country.

CODA

The great moments of a culture's self-knowledge are not always given to those who shape policy or command fleets. Sometimes they are given to a short, stout, taciturn man in a long coat standing on a south-bank wharf for an hour on a September afternoon, who sees that two ages are passing one another on the water in front of him and has the nerve to refuse to let the picture leave his hands. The wharf at Rotherhithe is built over now; the ship is timber in a Bermondsey church; the painting hangs in Room 34. The sun in it sets in the wrong place, and has been setting there, correctly, for one hundred and eighty-seven years.