Turner first painted this ship of the line in 1809 in his picture "The Battle of Trafalgar", where he described her as to be seen over the shatted stern of the "Redoutable", "98 guns, Ad. Harvey (commanding), engaged with the 'Fogieux' [sic], and part of the French line." While Turner was at Margate he may have seen the "Temeraire" being towed from Sheerness to Deptford to be broken up, and, deeply moved, painted a picture which has touched the hearts of generations of Englishmen since it was first shown at the Royal Academy in 1839.
The "Temeraire has become a symbol of naval heroism. She was the second ship in the line of battle at Trafalgar. When she tried to pass the "Victory" to take on herself the fire directed at Nelson's ship, he told her to keep astern. She held back, receiving the enemy's fire without returning a shot. To quote Ruskin, "Two hours later, she lay with a French seventy-four-gun ship on each side of her, both her prizes, one lashed to her mainmast, and one to her anchor."
Ruskin then concludes his account of Turner's "Fighting Temeraire" with one of the most beautiful paragraphs in English prose. "We have stern keepers to trust her glory to-the fire and the worm. Never more shall sunset lay golden robes on her, nor starlight tremble on the waves that part at her gliding. Perhaps, where the low gate opens to some cottage-garden, the tired traveller may ask, idly, why the moss grows so green on its rugged wood; and even the sailor's child may not answer, nor know, that the night-dew lies deep in the war-rents of the wood of the old Temeraire."
William Makepace Thackeray was as sentimental as Ruskin about the breaking up of the "Temeraire". As usual he expressed the popular point of view. "The little demon of a steamer is belching out a volume ... of foul, lurid, red-hot, malignant smoke ... while behind it (a cold grey moon looking down on it), slow, sad, and majestic, follows the brave old ship, with death, as it were, written on her." Such sentimentality was not in Turner's nature. If we look at his painting unemotionally, we can see that he wished to focus our attention on the tug. Turner has given the proud little steamer lines of grace and beauty, as she glides through the still sea like a black swan, towing the dim hulk of the warship. The calm of sunset evokes in the spectator a mood of tranquil melancholy, but it also suggests the end of one day and the begining of another. Did Turner look on the tug as a symbol of the New World towing behind it the Old? Is it too fanciful to look on this seascape as a companion to "Rain, Steam and Speed", both harbingers of a new but not unwelcome era?
