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Painting by J. M. W. Turner
the painting

The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838 is an oil on canvas painting by the English artist Joseph Mallord William Turner, painted in 1838 and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1839. The painting depicts the 98 gun HMS Temeraire, one of the last second rate ships of the line to have played a role in the Battle of Trafalgar, being towed up the Thames by a paddle wheel steam tug in 1838, towards its final berth in Rotherhithe to be broken up for scrap. The painting hangs in the National Gallery, London, having been bequeathed to the nation by the artist in 1851, as part of the Turner Bequest. In a poll organised by BBC Radio 4's Today programme in 2005, it was voted the nation's favourite painting. In 2020 it was included on the new £20 banknote, along with the artist's 1799 self portrait.

When Turner came to paint this picture he was at the height of his career, having exhibited at the Royal Academy, London for 40 years. He was renowned for his highly atmospheric paintings in which he explored the subjects of the weather, the sea and the effects of light. He spent much of his life near the River Thames and did many paintings of ships and waterside scenes, both in watercolour and in oils. Turner frequently made small sketches and then worked them into finished paintings in the studio. The current scholarly view is that it cannot be determined whether Turner actually witnessed the towing of the Temeraire, although several older accounts say that he watched the event from a variety of places on the river. He used considerable artistic licence in the painting, which had a symbolic meaning that his first audience immediately appreciated. Turner was twenty eight years old when Britain entered the Napoleonic Wars and "had a strong patriotic streak". The Temeraire was a well known ship from her heroic performance at the Battle of Trafalgar, and her sale by the Admiralty had attracted substantial press coverage, which was probably what brought the subject to his attention. Instead of the Temeraire flying the Union Jack, the tug is flying a white flag, evidence of the ship's sale to a private company.

The composition of this painting is unusual in that the most significant object, the old warship, is positioned well to the left of the painting, where it rises in stately splendour and almost ghostlike colours against a triangle of blue sky and rising mist that throws it into relief. The beauty of the old ship contrasts with the dirty blackened tugboat with its tall smokestack, which churns the otherwise still surface of the river. The blue triangle frames a second triangle of masted ships, which decrease in size as they become more distant. The Temeraire and tugboat have passed a small river craft with its gaff rigged sail barely catching a breeze. Beyond this a square rigger drifts, with all its sail extended. Another small craft shows as a patch of white farther down the river. In the far distance, beyond a second tugboat which makes its way towards them, a three masted ship rides at anchor. The becalmed vessels show the obsolescence of sail. On the opposite side of the painting to Temeraire, the same distance from the frame as the ship's main mast, the Sun sets above the estuary, its rays extending into the clouds above it, and across the surface of the water. The red of the clouds is reflected in the river, repeating the colour of the smoke from the tugboat. The sun setting symbolises the end of an era; one where sail has been overtaken by steam. Behind Temeraire, a sliver of Moon casts a beam across the river, symbolising the commencement of the new, industrial era. The demise of heroic strength is the main subject of the painting. It has been suggested that the ship stands for the artist himself, with an accomplished and glorious past but now contemplating his mortality. Turner called the work his "darling". Sir Henry Newbolt later wrote a ballad titled The Fighting Temeraire, describing the same scene: "And she's fading down the river, But in England's song for ever, She's the Fighting Téméraire."

Turner took a degree of artistic licence with the painting. The ship was known to her crew as "Saucy", rather than "Fighting" Temeraire. Before being sold to the ship breaker John Beatson, the ship had been lying at Sheerness Dockyard, and was then moved to his wharf at Rotherhithe, then in Surrey but now in Southwark. As shown in a "prosaic drawing, made on the spot by a trained observer" (William Beatson, the ship breaker's brother) and turned into a lithograph, her masts and rigging were removed before her sale and journey to the breaker's yard. All of her cannon, anchors and assorted hardware had been removed and salvaged for the navy to use as spare parts. She was towed by two tugboats, not just one, and in the other direction (the sun sets in the west, while the Thames estuary is at the river's eastern end). One of the tugboats, that depicted in the painting, was John Rogers Watkins' Monarch.