Painting · bridge
The Fighting Temeraire
J. M. W. Turner, 1839
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Bridge card between Romanticism ( 8) ↔ Impressionism, Iron Architecture ( 9).
Oil on canvas, 91 × 122 cm, painted by J. M. W. Turner in 1839. It shows the warship HMS Temeraire (a veteran of Trafalgar, 1805) being towed by a small steam tug towards a breaker’s yard on the edge of London, in September 1838. Turner put the scene together from memory and from other people’s accounts; the real tow was a far duller affair. The Thames sunset turns the sky orange and purple, and the ghostly white of the sailing ship sits against the smoky black of the tug. It is in the National Gallery in London.
A bridge card between Romanticism and Impressionism. From Romanticism it keeps the sublime sunset and the feeling about the end of the old ship. Pointing towards Impressionism are the outlines that come apart and a light that matters almost more than the ship does. Turner painted it some three decades before the movement officially began. He was not an Impressionist, but he anticipates the way they turned atmosphere and colour into the real subject.