The Fighting Temeraire by J. M. W. Turner

The Fighting Temeraire by J. M. W. Turner

The ghost and the tug

The old ship of the line rides high and pale on the left, her masts and rigging drawn in faint lines, almost a ghost. In front of her a squat, dark tug churns the water and trails a plume of smoke back across her. On the right the sun goes down in a blaze of orange and red, the paint laid on thickly, while a thin crescent moon hangs in the cooler sky at the upper left. The river is flat calm and holds the reflections of both.

The end of a Trafalgar ship

HMS Temeraire, a 98-gun ship, went into action close behind Nelson’s Victory at Trafalgar in 1805. In 1838 she was sold and towed up the Thames from Sheerness to Rotherhithe to be broken up. Turner took liberties: by then she had been stripped of her masts, and he gives them back. He showed the picture at the Royal Academy in 1839 and kept it for the rest of his life. In 2005 it was voted the greatest painting in Britain in a BBC radio poll, and it appears on the Bank of England’s £20 note.

Where it hangs

It came to the National Gallery, London, as part of Turner’s bequest to the nation, and measures 90.7 by 121.6 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 6,000-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 40 inches on its longest side.

Sources: National Gallery, London · Wikidata Q257580 · Wikimedia Commons