Gallantry dragged to its doom
Click the image to see it much bigger.
Back in the days when the middle-aged JMW Turner had no one actually willing to say his paintings were good, or even okay, a young fella called John Ruskin stood out in the middle of the crowd and used words like “brilliant” to describe Turner’s work. They became friends, Ruskin became a respected art critic and Turner became, eventually, brilliant in everyone’s eyes.
He certainly had a way with words, that Ruskin. He was asked to pass comment on Turner’s “The Fighting Temeraire, Tugged to her Last Berth to be Broken Up”, above, and waxed epicly poetic about the ship itself, which was the “hero” of the Battle of Trafalgar, not just taking fire unresponsively for Lord Nelson’s flagship, Victory, but seizing a couple of French assault ships too.
To set the scene for Ruskin’s words, this was back when Britannia (thanks to the triump at Trafalgar) ruled the waves and all that, and grown men wept openly about courage and flags and stuff. The website J-M-W-Turner.co.uk describes it better than I can:
When this painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in I839 its title was accompanied in the catalogue by these lines from Thomas Campbell’s “Ye Mariners of England”: The flag which braved the battle and the breeze, No longer owns her.
The passing of the age of sail into steamships, iron vessels, indeed the industrial revolution, coincided with great artist like Turner and John Constable painting both the old idyllic landscape with castles, abbeys and scenes of the past age alongside steam trains, boats and industrial changes as exciting them days as computer in our time.
So it was a scene begging to be recorded forever on canvas when, on September 6, 1838, Turner stood aboard a steamboat off England’s east coast watching the Temeraire being dragged toward London, where it would be broken up for parts, ending a 40-year career of glorious service to the nation.
And Ruskin said (we come to the point of all this) …
“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.”
Turner referred to this painting as “My Darling”, and refused to sell it.
