Temeraire

Boxing Day is a day for relaxation after the festivities of Christmas Day. Australian artist Deborah Walker’s lithograph in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria suggests one possible Boxing Day activity. Reading Barrie Sheppard’s essay on JMW Turner’s art is a fascinating reminder that change in our lives in inevitable.

Barrie writes: Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire of 1839 is England’s most famous painting, rivalled, perhaps, by John Constable’s The Hay Wain.

The “Temeraire’, a famous battleship of “the line”, played a heroic role in Nelson’s defeat of the French navy at the battle of Trafalgar. Turner shows it being towed by a steam tugboat to the breaker’s yard on the River Thames. Significantly, his rendering of the ship is not historically accurate, for when it was towed from the naval dockyard at Sheerness on the Kent coast, it had been de-masted in preparation for the breaker’s yard. It was, in fact, leaving an inglorious recent past, having served as a prison hulk, as accommodation for sailors, as a supply ship, and, finally, as a guard ship at the entrance to the Thames Estuary. Turner’s artistic licence was important for what he wanted his painting to convey.

Turner, as a citizen and a painter, was alive to the social and political events of his time, unlike Constable whose rural landscapes carry no reference to current political and social issues, such as the Corn Laws and Enclosure Acts that had affected the lives of the working people of Suffolk who he included in his landscapes.

Turner, on the other hand, embraced, as a subject, the most significant social and political change of the era: Industrialisation. His Fighting Temeraire makes clear reference to the industrial revolution’s effect on shipping. The ‘age of sail’ is shown being replaced by the ‘power of steam’. The tugboat, dwarfed by the sailing ship, tows the huge vessel, powerless without wind and sail, to the indignity of the breaker’s yard. The steamboat, a humble tug, leads the once majestic warship to its inglorious end, now only a ghost of its former grandeur; its steam replacement also suggested by the similarity of the tug’s bow-shape with that of the battleship. Other sail boats are there in the composition, but those akin to the Temeraire, are in the distant background.

The sunset (or is it a sunrise?) fills the right-hand half of the composition, so much so that it could be a separate painting. The sun itself, however, connects thematically to the action of the painting, suggesting the decline of sail-powered shipping. The buoy, in shadow to the right-hand foreground, links the steamboat to the sunset, all three functioning metaphorically for the loss consequent on industrialisation.  It is also significant that the title of the work (Fighting Temeraire) is in the present tense, evoking its former role as well as suggesting that it is resisting its impending destruction.

But is it just that? Another reading is possible – an interpretation that, without dismissing the sense of nostalgic loss, suggests that steam power is nevertheless not unwelcome. To this end, it is important to note that the sun is behind the Temeraire; hence, given that Sheerness is to the east of London, the two vessels must be moving westwards; so, the sun being behind them, it must be rising.

Obviously, this alternative reading depends upon Turner having accurately rendered the topography of the event. Which may not have been the case, because we know that topographical truth, though important, played a secondary role to his imaginative response to what he saw, or knew. Nevertheless, the apparent ambiguity lingers.

A similar, apparent ambiguity arises with the iconography of his Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway of 1844. In it, a steam locomotive is hauling open carriages crowded with passengers across a viaduct over the River Thames at Maidenhead in Berkshire. To the left is a road bridge empty of road traffic – horse-drawn coaches or carts that were painfully slow compared with the 30 to 40 miles per hour of the steam trains. On the river is a small boat which appears to be going nowhere, apparently becalmed, To the right, on a field, a farmer ploughs in the reverse direction to the train’s motion. Further, the composition is so arranged that the illusion is created that the train is speeding out of the picture frame into the future – a visual metaphor for the relentless, unstoppable drive of steam-powered industrialisation. Fire, the elemental power that drives the engine, can be seen bursting from the front of the firebox.

However, bounding ahead of the train is a hare, the fastest native British animal afoot (The hare is barely visible in reproductions of the painting, and even in the original, deterioration of the picture surface makes it difficult to see, but it is there.).

Are we to take it that the hare will outrun the train, or that it will be over-run by it? That nature, resilient, will survive the onslaught of industrialisation; or that it will succumb to it?

The apparent ambiguity in both The Fighting Temaraire and Rain Steam and Speed…” reveal a subtle, nuanced response by Turner to the momentous changes that were taking place in the society in which he lived, revealing his embrace of its reality, while at the same time acknowledging what is lost by it.