Why JMW Turner’s biggest portray is so misunderstood

As museums around the globe rejoice the 250th birthday of JMW Turner, it is time to reappraise his beloved and celebrated portray, The Combating Temeraire.

JMW Turner’s The Combating Temeraire turned a nationwide celeb when it was first unveiled in 1839, and its fame has endured to the current day. It was as soon as voted Britain’s favorite portray and presently options on £20 banknotes. However the extensively accepted interpretation of this iconic portray’s message would possibly, actually, contradict Turner’s true intentions.

The “Temeraire” of the title refers to a 98-gun warship of the British Navy, which is depicted within the portray’s background. It was a hero in Britain’s defence towards France through the Napoleonic Wars, however it caught the nation’s consideration in 1838 when it was dismantled and its components bought off. Turner’s portray depicts this once-mighty gladiator of the seas being towed down a burnished River Thames by a way more not too long ago invented steam-powered tugboat.

A short section within the 2012 James Bond movie Skyfall captures a preferred view in regards to the portray. Within the scene, Bond (Daniel Craig) meets Q (Ben Whishaw), his new head of analysis and improvement, in London’s Nationwide Gallery, they usually sit in entrance of The Combating Temeraire. “It all the time makes me really feel somewhat melancholy”, says the younger, tech-savvy Q, in a pointed jibe to 007, an old-school subject agent. “A grand previous warship being ignominiously hauled away for scrap.”

This echoes the extensively held perception that the portray evokes a way of nostalgia and light nationwide glory. In line with this view, the ghostly Temeraire is the portray’s heroine, and the tugboat its villain. Within the nineteenth Century, the English author William Makepeace Thackeray referred to the smaller vessel as “somewhat, spiteful, diabolical steamer” and the American novelist Herman Melville referred to as it “a pygmy steam-tug” by comparability to the “Titan Temeraire”.

You’ll be able to see why Turner’s authentic viewers could have sympathised with the humbled HMS Temeraire and been saddened by her destiny. Again in 1804, she had performed a essential position in blockading French ports and defending the British coast. However her best second got here on the afternoon of 21 October 1805, within the Atlantic Ocean, simply off the coast of south-west Spain.

At this pivotal hour, the Battle of Trafalgar, a lethal sea battle between the British Royal Navy and the mixed fleets of Spain and France, was at its climax. Admiral Lord Nelson’s flagship HMS Victory had led the assault however was being pummelled by the French vessel Redoubtable. Then, out of the cannon smoke, surged HMS Temeraire, adopted by a war-hungry flotilla of British vessels. The Temeraire blasted the Redoubtable along with her weapons and endured a hailstorm of cannon volleys in return – an onslaught that lacerated the ship and spattered her decks with blood. However like a stalwart prize-fighter, the Temeraire weathered the bout. She valiantly protected her flagship and performed an important half within the British navy’s final victory within the Battle of Trafalgar.

Turner was 64 when he painted The Combating Temeraire. He was born in 1775 in a down-at-heel space of London close to Covent Backyard however managed to enrol on the prestigious Royal Academy of Arts aged 14. He turned an Academician on the precocious age of 24, and a Professor of Perspective when he was simply 32. However though he rubbed shoulders with the nice and the great, he refused to melt his Cockney accent or refine his manners. He was additionally fiercely entrepreneurial – he opened his personal non-public gallery, sought rich patrons, and was all the time looking out for fascinating and profitable new inventive tasks that may have widespread enchantment. On one degree, The Combating Temeraire achieves his need for broad reputation by harnessing folks’s sense of nationwide pleasure.

However there’s an much more vital message to be taught from the portray than its patriotism and sentimentality. It issues that a lot maligned tugboat: the true focus of the portray.   

Steam energy was the brand new mechanical surprise of Turner’s age, and his angle to this current expertise was rather more sophisticated than Thackeray, Melville or Q recognised. In different Turner artworks, like Snow Storm – Steam-Boat (1842) and Rain, Steam and Velocity (1844), you’ll be able to see his fascination with trendy equipment and its transformative affect on particular person expertise, the surroundings, and society as a complete. That is in stark distinction with Turner’s nice rival John Constable, whose dad and mom had been from the elite, and whose work tended to miss a few of the most seismic adjustments that had been reshaping the British Isles on the time.

In Constable’s iconic 1821 portray The Hay Wain, an archaic cart rolls gently away from the viewer right into a bucolic English panorama. Turner’s The Combating Temeraire provides us the precise reverse, placing the spectator on a collision course with the unstoppable drive of trade.

This mirrored up to date actuality. On the time The Combating Temeraire was painted, the Royal Navy was more and more utilizing steamboats for towing greater vessels. Strikes had been already afoot to switch its sail-powered fleet with new steam frigates. However the demise of the Temeraire did not replicate a routine improve in armaments. This was a one-of-a-kind revolution in seafaring. Sailors around the globe had relied on wind-and-sail or oar-propulsion for hundreds of years. Now, steam engines may enable seafarers to beat the vagaries of gusts, shallows and tidal patterns – to supersede nature itself. The long run was steam-powered, however how this was going to have an effect on the way forward for transport, commerce and naval fight was nonetheless anyone’s guess within the 1830s. What Turner did know was that way back to Homer’s Odyssey, crusing functioned as a profound image of the life journey in artwork and literature. And so, by hitching the previous and the brand new so unforgettably in his portray, he reveals us a compelling metamorphosis – the start of a brand new, post-industrial lifecycle in human historical past.

Turner was awake to the duty of artists in occasions of irreversible historic change. For him, the age-old talent of depicting picket crusing ships, their rigging, sails and ornately carved figureheads was changing into out of date. The problem for each artist (and each member of society) within the trendy age, he realised, was to find magnificence and significance in newness, and in artefacts that had not beforehand been depicted in artwork, like iron funnels, pistons, valves, and paddle wheels. In The Combating Temeraire, his rise to this problem is captured in a really memorable and uncompromising image.

Turner even tailored his portray approach to specific the technological and social transformations on the planet round him. He used newly invented paint hues like Lemon Yellow and Scarlet Lake in The Combating Temeraire. Pigment evaluation of the portray additionally signifies that he raided from his kitchen for substances so as to add his paint to attain desired results, like tallow, cooking fats and even salad oil.

His curiosity in new expertise, and his seek for revolutionary strategies with which to signify them, had a direct affect on the subsequent technology of avant-garde painters. Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro had been each wowed by Turner’s artwork. An engraving of Turner’s Rain, Steam and Velocity (which depicts a practice hurtling over Maidenhead bridge) was even displayed at the primary Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1874 – a pivotal occasion within the historical past of contemporary artwork.

Steadily it has been accepted as a melancholy picture, a forlorn lament for previous glories and a misplaced lifestyle. However this misses its important level. The Combating Temeraire is basically about transformation and the inevitability of change moderately than nostalgia. Crucial classes to be taught from The Combating Temeraire are about Turner’s angle and outlook. It embodies his refusal to be daunted by newness or enslaved by conventional inventive values. His quest to search out the wonder and grandeur of contemporary expertise, and go away the previous behind, is magnificently on show in The Combating Temeraire. And these qualities are really his lasting legacy to trendy artwork.

The 250th anniversary of JMW Turner’s start is on 23 April 2025.