Why JMW Turner’s biggest portray is so misunderstood

As museums world wide have fun the 250th birthday of JMW Turner, it is time to reappraise his beloved and celebrated portray, The Preventing Temeraire.

JMW Turner’s The Preventing Temeraire turned a nationwide movie star 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 at present options on £20 banknotes. However the broadly accepted interpretation of this iconic portray’s message may, in truth, 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, 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 preferred view in regards to the portray. Within the scene, Bond (Daniel Craig) meets Q (Ben Whishaw), his new head of analysis and growth, in London’s Nationwide Gallery, they usually sit in entrance of The Preventing Temeraire. “It all the time makes me really feel a bit of melancholy”, says the younger, tech-savvy Q, in a pointed jibe to 007, an old-school discipline 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. 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 “a bit of, spiteful, diabolical steamer” and the American novelist Herman Melville known 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 vital function 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 Preventing 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 which may have widespread attraction. On one stage, The Preventing Temeraire achieves his need for broad reputation by harnessing individuals’s sense of nationwide pleasure.

However there’s an much more necessary 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 angle to this current know-how was rather more difficult than Thackeray, Melville or Q recognised. In different Turner artworks, like Snow Storm – Steam-Boat (1842) and Rain, Steam and Pace (1844), you may see his fascination with trendy equipment and its transformative affect on particular person expertise, the atmosphere, and society as a complete. That is in stark distinction with Turner’s nice rival John Constable, whose mother and father have been from the elite, and whose work tended to miss among the most seismic modifications that have 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 Preventing Temeraire offers us the precise reverse, placing the spectator on a collision course with the unstoppable power of trade.

This mirrored up to date actuality. On the time The Preventing Temeraire was painted, the Royal Navy was more and more utilizing steamboats for towing larger vessels. Strikes have been already afoot to interchange 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 world wide had relied on wind-and-sail or oar-propulsion for hundreds of years. Now, steam engines may permit seafarers to beat the vagaries of gusts, shallows and tidal patterns – to supersede nature itself. The longer term 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 occasions of irreversible historic change. For him, the age-old ability of depicting wood 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 Preventing 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 Preventing 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 know-how, and his seek for progressive strategies with which to characterize them, had a direct affect on the following era of avant-garde painters. Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro have been each wowed by Turner’s artwork. An engraving of Turner’s Rain, Steam and Pace (which depicts a prepare hurtling over Maidenhead bridge) was even displayed at the primary Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1874 – a pivotal occasion within the historical past of recent artwork.

Regularly 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 Preventing Temeraire is absolutely about transformation and the inevitability of change somewhat than nostalgia. A very powerful classes to study from The Preventing 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 seek out the wonder and grandeur of recent expertise, and go away the previous behind, is magnificently on show in The Preventing Temeraire. And these qualities are really his lasting legacy to trendy artwork.

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