Turner · 1838
The Fighting Temeraire
On the afternoon of Wednesday the fifth of September 1838, on the Thames at Rotherhithe in east London, the ninety-eight-gun second-rate ship of the line HMS *Temeraire*, twenty-three years out of front-line Royal Navy service, sold by Admiralty auction to the breakers' yard of John Beatson at Rotherhithe for £5,530, was towed up the Thames from Sheerness on the Medway by two paddle-tugs to the breakers' wharf. *Temeraire*, launched at Chatham in 1798, had been the second ship in Nelson's weather column at Trafalgar on the twenty-first of October 1805, immediately astern of HMS *Victory*; she had taken the surrender of the French *Redoutable* and the spanish *San Justo* in the action that killed Nelson. By the autumn of 1838 she had been a stationary receiving-ship at Sheerness for the fifteen previous years and the Admiralty had condemned her. The tow-up the river was watched, by the Greenwich and Rotherhithe waterfront, by several thousand people. Among them, on the southern bank near Greenwich, was the painter Joseph Mallord William Turner, sixty-three years old, who sketched the tow from the waterfront in a octavo notebook. The painting that came out of the sketch, *The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last Berth to be broken up, 1838* (oil on canvas, 90.8 × 121.9 cm), was exhibited at the Royal Academy in May 1839. Turner refused to sell the picture in his lifetime; he bequeathed it to the nation on his death in 1851. The painting is in the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, where it has hung continuously since 1856 and where it was, by the 2005 BBC *Today* programme public poll, voted *the greatest painting in Britain*.
It is twenty past three on the afternoon of the fifth of September 1838, on the south bank of the Thames at Rotherhithe in east London, in late-summer afternoon light through the river-haze of low tide. He is sixty-three years old. He is Joseph Mallord William Turner, born at 21 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, on the twenty-third of April 1775 (the St George's Day), son of William Turner the Covent Garden barber-and-wig-maker and Mary Marshall (committed to Bethlem in 1799 and died there in 1804), schooled at the Royal Academy Schools from fourteen (the youngest admission of his generation), elected Royal Academician at the age of twenty-seven (the youngest RA of the period), at the date of the tow-up the English landscape and marine painter alive and the professor of perspective at the Royal Academy schools since 1807.
He has, in his coat-pocket, a octavo sketching notebook bound in cream calfskin (the Margate to Dover sketchbook of 1838, now in the Tate Britain Turner Bequest collection). He has, in the past twenty minutes, made three pencil sketches of the Temeraire under tow.
He thinks: the two paddle-tugs are towing her up at, by the estimate of the waterman I spoke to ten minutes ago, about four knots against the flood tide. The Temeraire has her masts on board but has been demasted of the yards and the rigging for the tow.
He thinks: the ship behind the paddle-tugs is the physical body of the English-naval-Trafalgar-memory. She was the second ship in Nelson's column. The painting Nelson never had painted of the action was the Temeraire taking the Redoutable's surrender at three in the afternoon. The Temeraire is the ship that, in the public-memory of the British nation, took the place of the Victory in the public mind from about 1810 onward, when the Victory became the flagship in ordinary at Portsmouth and the Temeraire stayed in service.
He thinks: the tow is the visual emblem of the nineteenth-century question. The wooden walls of the eighteenth-century naval supremacy of this country are being broken up by the iron-and-coal age. The two paddle-tugs are the future. The Temeraire is the past.
He thinks: the painting has to put the two on the same canvas, in the same light, at the same moment. The painting is not a marine painting of the tow-up. The painting is an allegory of the transition between the two ages of British naval power.
He sketches for another forty minutes on the south bank. He returns to his studio at 47 Queen Anne Street in Marylebone by the evening. The painting is begun on a primed canvas in the studio the following week and is completed by the late winter of 1839.
The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last Berth to be broken up, 1838 was exhibited at the Royal Academy summer exhibition of 1839 (canvas 90.8 by 121.9 cm, oil on canvas, original frame designed by Turner). The exhibition catalogue ran the two-line quotation Turner had attached: the flag which braved the battle and the breeze, no longer owns her. The critical reception, by the 1839 reviews of John Ruskin in Modern Painters Volume I (1843, but the reviewing-record of 1839 in Ruskin's private journal), of the Athenaeum and the Times, was almost uniformly admiring. Turner was offered a thousand guineas for the painting in 1844 by the collector William Wells; he refused. He turned down further offers from the Vernon collection, the National Gallery purchase fund, and (in 1845) the publisher Henry Graves who wished to engrave it. He retained the canvas in his studio at Queen Anne Street through the remaining twelve years of his life.
Turner died at his rented cottage at 119 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, on the nineteenth of December 1851, seventy-six years old. He left the entire studio contents (about 285 oils and 30,000 sketches and watercolours, the Turner Bequest) to the British nation by the 1829 will (modified through several codicils, the final 1851 version preserved in the National Archives). The Fighting Temeraire was the painting of the Bequest and was the first of the Bequest oils to be put on permanent public display, at the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square in 1856. It has hung continuously in the National Gallery since (the room-number has changed; it is, in the 2025 hang, in Room 34). The 2005 BBC Today programme public poll of the greatest painting in Britain placed the Fighting Temeraire first, ahead of Constable's Hay Wain and Holbein's Ambassadors. The 2020 issue of the twenty-pound Bank of England note features the portrait of Turner on the reverse, with the Fighting Temeraire in the background.