Why JMW Turner’s greatest painting is so misunderstood

As museums all over the world 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 favourite painting and at the moment options on £20 banknotes. However the broadly accepted interpretation of this iconic portray’s message may, in reality, 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 in the course of the Napoleonic Wars, nevertheless it caught the nation’s consideration in 1838 when it was dismantled and its elements offered off. Turner’s portray depicts this once-mighty gladiator of the seas being towed down a burnished River Thames by a way more lately invented steam-powered tugboat.

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

This echoes the broadly held perception that the portray evokes a way of nostalgia and light nationwide glory. Based on 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 “a bit, spiteful, diabolical steamer” and the American novelist Herman Melville referred to as it “a pygmy steam-tug” by comparability to the “Titan Temeraire”.

You possibly can see why Turner’s authentic viewers might have sympathised with the humbled HMS Temeraire and been saddened by her destiny. Again in 1804, she had performed a crucial position in blockading French ports and defending the British coast. However her most interesting 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 personal gallery, sought rich patrons, and was at all times looking out for charming and profitable new inventive tasks which may have widespread enchantment. On one degree, The Combating Temeraire achieves his need for broad recognition by harnessing folks’s sense of nationwide pleasure.

However there’s an much more vital message to study 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 perspective to this current expertise was far more difficult than Thackeray, Melville or Q recognised. In different Turner artworks, like Snow Storm – Steam-Boat (1842) and Rain, Steam and Velocity (1844), you may see his fascination with trendy equipment and its transformative affect on particular person expertise, the setting, 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 some of the most seismic changes 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 pressure of business.

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 mirror a routine improve in armaments. This was a one-of-a-kind revolution in seafaring. Sailors all over the world 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 exhibits 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 instances of irreversible historic change. For him, the age-old ability of depicting picket crusing ships, their rigging, sails and ornately carved figureheads was turning 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 precise 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 realize desired results, like tallow, cooking fats and even salad oil.

His curiosity in new expertise, and his seek for modern methods with which to characterize them, had a direct influence 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 prepare hurtling over Maidenhead bridge) was even displayed at the first Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1874 – a pivotal occasion within the historical past of recent artwork.

Incessantly 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 admittedly about transformation and the inevitability of change slightly than nostalgia. A very powerful classes to study from The Combating Temeraire are about Turner’s perspective 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 recent expertise, and depart 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.