JMW Turner's The Fighting Temeraire
Posted on 04/17/2025 1:48:45 PM PDT by nickcarraway
As museums around the world celebrate the 250th birthday of JMW Turner, it's time to reappraise his beloved and celebrated painting, The Fighting Temeraire.
JMW Turner's The Fighting Temeraire became a national celebrity when it was first unveiled in 1839, and its fame has endured to the present day. It was once voted Britain's favourite painting and currently features on £20 banknotes. But the widely accepted interpretation of this iconic painting's message might, in fact, contradict Turner's true intentions.
The "Temeraire" of the title refers to a 98-gun warship of the British Navy, which is depicted in the painting's background. It was a hero in Britain's defence against France during the Napoleonic Wars, but it caught the nation's attention in 1838 when it was dismantled and its parts sold off. Turner's painting depicts this once-mighty gladiator of the seas being towed down a burnished River Thames by a much more recently invented steam-powered tugboat.
A brief segment in the 2012 James Bond film Skyfall captures a popular view about the painting. In the scene, Bond (Daniel Craig) meets Q (Ben Whishaw), his new head of research and development, in London's National Gallery, and they sit in front of The Fighting Temeraire. "It always makes me feel a little melancholy", says the young, tech-savvy Q, in a pointed jibe to 007, an old-school field agent. "A grand old warship being ignominiously hauled away for scrap."
This echoes the widely held belief that the painting evokes a sense of nostalgia and faded national glory. According to this view, the ghostly Temeraire is the painting's heroine, and the tugboat its villain. In the 19th Century, the English writer William Makepeace Thackeray referred to the smaller vessel as "a little, spiteful, diabolical steamer" and the American novelist Herman Melville called it "a pygmy steam-tug"
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
JMW Turner's The Fighting Temeraire
Did it go into the hulk prison program?
Ping
Thank you.
Lovely article. Thanks.
“The King has one more move”. Very uplifting.
Thanks for this...
I think it has been refurbished and is now being used to shuttle illegal migrants from North Africa into the UK, 1000 at a time.
April 23 will be his 250th birthday.
Is it being towed by a steamship?
Read the rest; question answered.
Although the composition is pleasant, it's hard to make out that painting but I guess it's supposed to be the war ship being towed by some kind of tugboat.
The beeb may be ‘correct’ about the artist’s intention, but intention or not, I disagree.
As someone who has loved this painting since the first time I saw it, I agree with Q and the others that, progress aside, the image that shines through is one of fading glory being taken to oblivion by a harsh future.
Or perhaps that’s just my inner Tolkien speaking. I have the feeling he would agree with that sentiment. But then again, he was a rather nostalgic fellow, wansn’t he?
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