J M W Turner is famed for his mastery of light and colour. For him, as for Monet, light was a miraculous phenomenon — it produced colour, it sculpted form and mood and it revealed the beauty of nature. He was also remarkably prolific, leaving some 550 oil paintings and 2,000 watercolours (as well as about 30,000 sketches), so you don’t have to go out of your way in this country to find a Turner. He was a keen traveller, and I love the fact that he came to Yorkshire and painted such familiar landmarks (to us) as Hardraw Force, Malham Cove, and Harewood House. Indeed, the Tate holds six full sketchbooks from Turner’s tour of Yorkshire in 1816.
However, the subject of this blog is set not in Yorkshire but on the Thames river. This painting by Turner, The Fighting Temeraire, on display in the National Gallery, depicts the last journey of the HMS Temeraire. The Temeraire had been a celebrated gunship that had fought valiantly in Lord Nelson’s fleet at the battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Indeed, prior to that battle, she had been merely the Temeraire; it was afterwards she was honoured with the “Fighting” sobriquet. Thirty three years later, however, decaying and well past her glory days, she was towed up the Thames from Sheerness to be broken up in a Rotherhithe shipyard.
Turner’s painting pays tribute to the Temeraire’s heroic past. The glorious sunset is a fanfare of colour in her honour. Paint is laid on thickly to render the sun’s rays striking the clouds, whilst by contrast, the ship’s rigging is meticulously painted. It can be seen as a symbol of the end of an era, even the decline of Britain’s naval power, with the sun setting on the days of elegant, tall-masted warships. The Temeraire is already phantasmal, behind the more solid form of the squat little steam tug that pulls her along to her fate.
Turner was in his sixties when he painted The Fighting Temeraire; perhaps this was behind his thinking in terms of the end of an era. In any event, the painting is an arresting piece of work and, distinct from Turner’s many strictly-landscape paintings, it tells a story. I love it.
