The Fighting Temeraire is a painting by J.M.W. Turner, shown in London in 1839 and now in the National Gallery. It shows HMS Temeraire, a veteran of Trafalgar, being towed up the Thames by a steam tug to be broken up. Most people read it as a farewell to the age of sail.
Turner painted the warship pale and tall against a blazing sunset, with a small black tug pulling at her bow. The whole picture rests on that contrast: the old navy led off by a machine.
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The farewell is real, but the ship in it is not quite the ship that went up the Thames. A shipbreaker named Beatson hired two steam tugs for the job, and Turner painted one. The National Gallery adds that his sun is setting in the wrong direction.
Then there is the ship herself. Accounts of the tow say the navy had stripped her of masts and rigging before the sale, yet Turner gives her three tall masts. The most famous ghost in British painting was, on the day, a hulk.
I don't think this was carelessness. Every change makes the old ship taller, paler and lonelier, and the tug smaller, blacker and busier. The question is what each one was for.
What had the real Temeraire done?
On 21 October 1805, at Trafalgar, the Temeraire, a 98-gun three-decker, ended up locked between two French ships, the Redoutable and the Fougueux. A drawing in the National Maritime Museum shows the three hulls jammed together, the British ship sandwiched in the middle.
Three decades later the navy had no use for her. In June 1838 the Admiralty ordered her sold, and she went for £5,530 to John Beatson, a shipbreaker and timber merchant at Rotherhithe. Beatson hired two steam tugs to bring her from Sheerness along the Thames.
The tow took about two days, and she reached his wharf on 6 September. Whether Turner watched any of it cannot be determined, though older accounts have him on the river that day. He showed the painting at the Royal Academy the following spring, and the ship on his canvas looked nothing like the hulk that reached the wharf.
What You'll Discover
What the ship was missing.
What hides in the corners.
What one critic saw in the smoke.
What Turner refused to lend.