polity united kingdom victorianconcept:era modern
The Fighting Temeraire
Oil on canvas (1839) by J.M.W. Turner, depicting the warship HMS Temeraire — a veteran of the Battle of Trafalgar — being towed to the breaker's yard by a steam tug. Named the greatest painting in Britain in a 2005 public poll.
Scholarly Significance
Turner's most celebrated work. The Fighting Temeraire (1839) anchors late Romanticism and the tension between industrial modernity and heroic past in British art.
Notes
- ·J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) exhibited this work at the Royal Academy in 1839.
- ·HMS Temeraire was a 98-gun second-rate warship that played a distinguished role at the Battle of Trafalgar (1805); its sale for scrap in 1838 prompted Turner's elegiac response.
- ·The glowing sunset, pale ghost-ship, and black steam tug encode a meditation on industrial modernity displacing heroic tradition.
- ·Turner specified in his will that this work should never leave England; it is part of the Turner Bequest to the National Gallery (1856).
- ·Named 'the greatest painting in Britain' in a 2005 BBC poll.