Free Republic

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....

Telemann Concerto in D Major for 3 Trumpets Turner from 1796-1825 Purcell Trumpet Tune and Air Turner from 1826-1850

In the late summer of 1838, H.M.S. Temeraire, a once-glorious remnant of the Battle of Trafalgar of 1805, was towed up the Thames to the wharf at Rotherhithe, to be broken up and sold for her fittings and oaken timbers. J.M.W. Turner's painting of the doomed ship's final passage, in which he summoned her illustrious past by rechristening her the "Fighting Temeraire," never left his possession and became part of his bequest to the nation after his death in 1851 at age 76. Enshrined in the National Gallery in London since 1856 and embodying a nostalgic nation's memory of an...