Joseph Mallord William Turner (J.M.W. Turner) was an artistic bastion of the Romantic movement in British, and European, culture. His work not only redefined the use of landscape in painting, but is perhaps the most reputable visual condemnation of the ‘equal[ities] and opposite[s]’ which defined the rationalism of the neoclassical enlightenment and its scientific epitomisation: the Industrial Revolution. The Romantic movement of which Turner was a part valorised a blissful, emotional, ignorance, as it attempted to locate a truly human response. Romanticism sourced itself from the apotheosised aesthetics of nature; a Romantic is intellectually elevated above those who surround him, but his dilemma is that he is not a master of nature; he has not risen all the way. The Romantic has shrouded himself in a luscious cloak of intellectual endeavour beyond that exhibited by most others, but he is forever dejected, as he is not an angel: unlike the neoclassicist, the Romantic knows that he may try to climb forever, but his soul shall forever be constrained to a vain physical existence. Dismal as this incipiently sounds, it is, indeed, this very dejection that the Romantic so vivaciously seizes upon as the inspiration for their work. Within the hopeless pursuit of intellectual salvation, within a present so entirely marred by itself, and within the infinite reach of nature, the Romantic sees an opportunity for originality and creation. This Romantic sentiment is poignantly encapsulated in Percy Byssche Shelley’s ‘Art Thou Pale For Weariness’, in which he asks the moon if it is ‘pale for weariness’ of ‘wandering companionless’ around the cosmos, ‘finding no object worth its constancy’. The last line potently epitomises Shelley’s cry: how he wishes he was that object, so he could ascend, worth the attention of the cosmos.

Born in 1775, fourteen years before the French Revolution, Turner would have been a witness to a transition into an indubitably tumultuous epoch: the French diplomat Talleyrand said that nobody born after 1789 would ever know how sweet and gentle life could be. Turner would have watched Europe trample itself close to a breaking point in a whirling tempest of grand warfare, concluding with an austere restriction of cultural and philosophical development as outlined in the Congress of Vienna and the resulting treaties. Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution was mechanising production and in doing so radically changing the cultural and physical landscape of Britain: cities were increasingly becoming sprawls of factories and their workers, and the skyscape was permanently marred by dense smog churned out by these new factories. Seven years after Turner’s death this pernicious pollution progressed into smell, with the Great Stink of 1858 - much was present to ruin every moment of Turner’s London-based observations. As he looked out of the window of his London house, J.M.W. Turner would have seen a city shackled by unthinking, robotic manufacturing and an obsession with scientific rationality, but one which held a capacity for human greatness, in the intellectual, Romantic sense. To him, all could be perfect, if only it wasn’t now.

Perhaps Turner’s Magnum Opus, The Fighting Temeraire was first exhibited in 1839 at the Royal Academy, having been started in late 1838. It depicts a white, ethereal ship, HMS Temeraire, as it was tugged to be broken up for scrap by a steam tug, from which a thick plume of smoke obscures some of the ship’s mast. This scene is located on the left of the canvas, against a resplendent landscape; London sits in the distance, and the sun sets (Turner’s last words were ‘the sun is God’), partially veiled by fumes, and moonlight shines in from the left. The water in which the ship and the tug are depicted has taken on the colour of the moon, and it appears to be spreading into the empty section of sunlit water even in the still image. The Fighting Temeraire is oil on canvas.

HMS Temeraire was a spectacular vessel. a 98-gun Neptune Class Ship of the Line, it gained fame for a heroic performance at the Battle of Trafalgar (1804), in which Admiral Nelson’s fleet defeated a numerically superior French fleet in the Napoleonic Wars, ending the Emperor’s ambitions of capturing Britain. HMS Temeraire sailed next to HMS Victory, Nelson’s flagship, during the battle, saving it once, before capturing two enemy ships. The Temeraire was the only ship singled out for a heroic performance in the reports to the admiralty after the battle. Trafalgar Square and Nelson’s Column were in construction around the time of Turner’s painting, so the ship maintained patriotic importance even as it embarked on the fatal journey towards Rotherhithe. The ship would have fought with a ferocious capacity for destruction even amongst its visual splendour; the preserved HMS Victory only possesses ten more guns than the Temeraire, and is a particularly visually intimidating spectacle. The ship is an apt deposit for nostalgia towards the era when the Great British shipyards delivered these splendid Ships of the Line for maintaining the country’s international standing. Having participated in what was then the most eminent ideological battle in European history, HMS Temeraire, as this magnificent vessel, would arouse a melancholy feeling from a reminiscent Turner (who would have viewed this reminiscence as glorious), as he pictured it maintaining its ethereal splendour, in vain, during its journey towards destruction, embodying mortality and the end of an era.

The Temeraire itself is rather pale in its representation, and it is perhaps the case that it is apt to describe the colour as ghostly. The ship lacks significant painted detail; the few minor aspects included (limited almost entirely to the forepeak) are created with layered browns only. The three white masts stand with sails drawn, partially obscured by the smoke billowing out of the steam tug. This colour and simplicity serve to represent the mortality of this ship and the era it represents. Furthermore, the ship’s portrayal can be related to the role it played in existing as a depository for patriotic sentiments in England: this embodiment of the word spectacular, this vanquisher of Britain’s enemies, is suddenly emotionally vacuous; The Fighting Temeraire depicts the ghost of a grander vessel, a notion furthered by the ship’s position in moonlight; night sets on this spectacular warship.

The setting sun colours and is obscured by a dense, orange smog, the same colour as the fiery plume emerging from the steam-tug. It projects this colour over the water, drawing a boundary that separates the Temeraire from the river beyond it. This smog, of course, is the pollution from industrialised London, the smothering imperfection which ruined nature by trying to master it. The smog embodies the aforementioned notion of an impurity associated with now; Turner sees this picture of a sun, a moon, and a spectacular vessel of war, but reality forces him to include the smoke and the steam-tug.

The steam-tug itself occupies a more central position to the Temeraire, and it is depicted releasing a plume of orange, fiery smoke which obscures our view of the ship, as its furious paddles disrupt the pristine mirror of the river. It is the full embodiment of all which Romantics, and therefore Turner, detest: it ruins both natural and patriotic splendour, and it contributes to the repugnant haze which obscures the potentially fabulous sunset. Furthermore, the tug’s smoke penetrates the sky which the pristinely clear moonlight possesses, shifting the dimension of the colour conflict which strikingly lacerates the canvas in two so that the moonlight, which illuminates the ship, is three-dimensionally assaulted within the canvas.

The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last Berth to be broken up conveys a melancholy lamentation for what is not to be; Turner peered through at a joyless image and saw in it an epitomisation of the cultural movement he subscribed to. He never saw the event take place, which adds a new dimension to the interpretations, since this piece is fundamentally imagined: Turner makes no attempt to replicate the Temeraire’s actual journey. From a factual perspective, the painting misses several elements, such as other boats, which would have been present in 1838 as the Temeraire was tugged up the Thames. However, this allows us to ascertain a cultural and idealistic interpretation of the work, as Turner would have invested himself in conveying mental images, which are inherently mixed with ideas and emotions, over factually representing a historical event. The great Romantic poet Willaim Wordsworth ends his poem ‘Strange Fits of Passion’ with the exclamation ‘if Lucy should be dead!’ The Fighting Temeraire is perhaps the answer to this dismal outcry: Turner sees in the doomed HMS Temeraire an embodiment of human lacking, for we cannot achieve the greatness he sees us ruining in this image.