In Our Time - The Fighting Temeraire

Episode Date: November 10, 2016

This image: Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Fighting Temeraire, 1839 (c) The National Gallery, LondonMelvyn Bragg and guests discuss "The Fighting Temeraire", one of Turner's greatest works and the one he called his 'darling'. It shows one of the most famous ships of the age, a hero of Trafalgar, being towed up the Thames to the breakers' yard, sail giving way to steam. Turner displayed this masterpiece to a public which, at the time, was deep in celebration of the Temeraire era, with work on Nelson's Column underway, and it was an immediate success, with Thackeray calling the painting 'a national ode'.With Susan Foister Curator of Early Netherlandish, German and British Painting at the National GalleryDavid Blayney Brown Manton Curator of British Art 1790-1850 at Tate Britainand James Davey Curator of Naval History at the National Maritime MuseumProducer: Simon Tillotson.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for news about In Our Time, and for recommendations about our archive, please follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, the fighting Temeraa from 1839, is one of Turner's greatest works, the one he called His Darling. It shows a famous ship of the age, a hero of the Battle of Trafalgar, on its final journey, being towed up the Thames to the Breaker's Yard. Most of the canvas is sky, an extraordinary, largely orange sunset, reflected in still water. Near the bottom left of centre is a small black fiery tugboat from the new age of steam. Paddles churning. The tamarerar, fall-masted

from the age of sail, ethereal and white glides behind to its face. When Turner first displayed this masterpiece, the Victorian public was deep in celebrations of the Temerah era, with work on Nelson's column underway in the Neutrophaga Square,

and Thackeray described the painting as a national ode. With me to discuss the fighting Temeraharer are Susan Foister, curator of early Netherlandsish, German and British painting at the National Gallery, David Blaney Brown, the mountain curator of British Art at Tate Britain, and James Davy, curator of naval history at the National Maritime Museum. Susan Foister, where was Turner in his career in 1839? Well, he was at the height of his powers as a painter, extremely successful.

In his early 60s, he had achieved success as a painter when he was very young. He was appointed a full member of the Royal Academy when he was only 26 in 1802, and he achieved the success that allowed him to be commercially successful to create his own gallery where he would show his paintings, as well as continuing to exhibit at the Royal Academy. In 1839, when the Temerere was exhibited, he showed three other paintings alongside it.

So he was immensely productive, immensely busy, a very well-travelled man, and he had by that stage complete command of the powers of painting, and he had transformed the genres of paintings. So landscape painting, seascapes, really became something else through Turner, something much more poetic and historic and meaningful.

And he was able to use light and colour and the ways in which he painted to really transform people's experience of looking at those kinds of scenes. He had an immense sense of history and of his own place in history, I think. He was always a little bit of an outsider. So he, in 1829, had made his will already

in which he envisaged leaving his paintings to the nation, and that was how the fighting Temerere came to the nation. So he had this immense sense of the sweep of history and his place in it, not in an egotistical way, because he was, I think, a bit of a pessimist in that sense. He wrote a long poem called the Fallacies of Hope, which he constantly quoted little pieces

to set alongside the subjects of his paintings. He was an unusual, an original man. There was a double track to simplify it, in a way, wasn't it? There was a track that came from being the son of a barber in Covengarten, who's the father of that barber had been a barber. he'd been his mother condemned to what they then called a lunatic asylum and Bethlehem

Bedlam, he was sent out to be farmed out to relatives to bring him up but this let's call a genius we might as well showed very early on his father displayed his paintings in the barber shop and he got into so there's the track of that track he never lost his Courtney accident he never lost that sort of connection let us say with Covent Garden and that but he had a very classical training he went

into the when he was 14 and he did the copied bus, he copied the great works and so on. Yes, and he was very early on successful in the work of topographical landscape. So he was particularly successful as a watercolour artist early on. So he would paint subjects like Eaton or Oxford or Great Abys. And these were immensely successful subjects that could also be engraved, which was another way of making commercial success in this period. So books came out and he got the royalties from that. He was very, can you tell us about his relationship with the Thames

because this plays a big part in the Temer and in many of his paintings, but the Thames? Well, he was a Londoner, so born in Covent Garden, he was never far from the Thames. And then early on in life he moved to the western side, bit beyond London, to Isleworth, and then to Twickenham, where he built a house and lived for a long time. and at that period he painted a lot of rather beautiful and tranquil paintings of the Thames. He had a boat and would sometimes go out on the boat,

though one shouldn't assume that he was always sitting there sketching. And then the Thames continued to play a really important part in his career and in his paintings. And he was very responsive to the dramas of the Thames. So, for example, when the Houses of Parliament caught fire, That was an opportunity for a painting of the Thames with this fire blazing around it and reflected in it. Rain, steam and speed, which he painted after the Temer Air. That showed the railway bridge over the River Thames at Maidenhead. Thank you. James Davy. Where had the Timorah made her reputation?

The Temerair was one of the most famous naval ships in Britain by the time Turner was painting the fighting Temerere. It had been launched in 1798 and really, was a wonderful example of British shipbuilding expertise. It was a very large ship, 180 foot long, and was armed with 98 guns. So a really fearsome armament. And we were told it took 5,000 oak trees to build. Yes, I've read 5,000.

I've also read 2,000. It sort of depends where you want to... Well, how big of the oak was. Well, indeed, indeed. Unfortunately, no one at the time actually counted the number of oak trees. But certainly a huge, a huge amount. So it was a large ship. fearsome ship and it took a very active role in the French Revolutionary Wars and then the Napoleonic

wars that followed on a range of duties around Europe. It was a key part of the Channel fleet that blockaded the French Navy in port. It was involved in operations around the Iberian Peninsula, particularly the defence of Cadiz in 1810 and various other operations in the Mediterranean and the Baltic Sea where it was employed protecting British interests there. But of course the Temera is most famously associated with the Battle of Trafalgar, this amazing great event in 1805 when a British fleet commanded by Horatio Nelson defeated a much larger fleet of French and Spanish ships. Can you go into a bit of detail?

Because I think all that's really thrilling. So Nelson's on victory, the victory. He does this right-angled attack on the French and Spanish race, which has been done before. But it's a very brave thing to. And he leads. That was a time when they used to lead, the people who run the show, didn't they?

And he led and exposed himself through a lot of fire. And the victory on which he was got into terrible trouble. And that's when the Temera made his reputation. Absolutely. Nelson was trying to lead by example. Normally if you were the commander-in-chief, you would put yourself in the middle of the fleet, so it was not to expose yourself. And so you could direct the battle as it played out.

But Nelson understood he was asking his ships and the crews of his ships to undergo a fearsome bomb. as they approached the enemy. So he made sure that his ship, the victory, was going to be right at the front of one of the lines approaching the enemy. The Temerere was right behind him. And as you say, yes, the victory got into a bit of bother. It's typical a bit of bother. That may knock a bit. So it was, I mean, I'm being too lighthearted, absolutely. It was locked in a ferocious combat with the French ship, the Redu Tabor. And it looked for a few moments as if the Redu Tavla was going to be able to board and take the victory. victory, but just in the nick of time, the Temerere comes alongside the French ship, launches a number of broadsides into it, and then boards and takes it. It then repeats the trick. Later in the battle, another French vessel, the Fougeau attacks the Temerereer, but again the Temerere fires a number of broadsides into it,

comes alongside boards and captures the vessel. So you have this situation at the end of the Battle of Trafalgar. Britain has won a great victory, but the Temerereir has played a great victory, but the Temerere has played a crucial part, capturing two enemy ships, but also coming to the rescue of the fleet's flagship. And it's for that reason that when Cuthbert Collingwood, who is writing his dispatches back to the Abelty after, who was second in command, an assumed command following the death of Nelson,

he's writing his dispatches back to the Admiralty, and he only chooses one ship to single out for a special mention, and that ship is the Temerere. And from that moment, the Temerereir has this reputation, and for audaciousness in battle and for fighting ability that would go on into the 19th century. And then the Temera leads a long life

doing this, that and the other, because its great days had been done. Absolutely. It's a prison ship at one stage, it's a guardship, it's stripped of its masks. Exactly, a number of roles. By 1812, it is very worn out. It's seen a lot of active service.

as I've explained at Trafalgar and elsewhere. And wooden ships decay. That's a fact of the 18th century navy. And so by 1812, the Admiralty decides to retire the ship. But of course it's invested a lot of money in the ship over the years, so they're not just going to let it go to waste. So they use it in a variety of ways. Initially, as you say, as a prison hulk,

the British had a big problem in the Napoleonic Wars trying to house the huge numbers of prisoners they captured. and so one short-term measure was to use these decrepit old ships as essentially floating jails. And so the Temerere was a prison hulk for a few years. Subsequently, a receiving ship where it would have received new recruits, a store ship, and then lastly as a guard ship at the entrance of the Medway River. Sort of like Black Beauty going down and down the hill, isn't it really? That sort of romance to it.

And David Blaney Brown, what might the last journey of the Tamarra, what made it particularly attractive, do you think, to Turner? Well, I think it's important to remember that Turner probably never actually saw the last voyage at the Thames to Rod the Hive to the Breaker's Yard, because it wasn't announced in the newspapers, as far as we can tell. It wasn't publicized. Maybe the sort of, um, december. of these great ships was a rather sort of embarrassing and shaming thing, or maybe it was

simply happening so often because by that time so many of them were coming to the end of their working lives that it wasn't a matter of note. But by the time the Temerere arrived Rotherhithe and was moored and got ready for breaking up, she did become a tremendous tourist attraction and was written about in the papers. And that's probably, I think, when Turner thought that this would be an interesting subject for a painting. And this would have been in the autumn of 1838. He would have wanted to get a picture ready to respond to this recent topic for the Royal Academy, which opened in May 39.

So he would have had to work quite quickly. And I think he thought that having already painted... a picture of the Battle of Trafalgar, including the Temererea, having painted marine pictures, sea pictures, naval pictures, and indeed watercolours for many years, that this was the subject that he should take up. And he began, I think, to realise that he could make that subject a kind of elegy for the Nelson era and for the age of sail and for the sort of heroic age of fighting ships. And he could also introduce the idea of, on the one hand, the ending of a veneer and then perhaps the movement into a new one, because after all, the Temererea was towed up river by steam tugs. So you have the age of sail on the one hand and the new age of steam on the other. So you have this kind of transition from the old to the new, and you could celebrate a great past, a great history,

and create a kind of image of mortality in a way, because the ship in the picture has an almost human quality. It's as if that one ship represents the Navy and all the sailors and the crew and the marines who had fought in. such ships, they could all be memorialized in that one picture. And Turner by this time, by the 1830s, had taken upon himself the mantle of a kind of national painter who aspired to paint national themes that could speak to the country as a whole. And I think that's what he wanted to do in the Fighting Temererea. I mean, he called the picture the Fighting Terminator. I mean, he called the picture

the fighting Temererea, which evokes her heroic battle past, her role at Trafalgar and afterwards, and he made her representative of that great age of fighting ships, the wooden walls, the hearts of oak, that in many ways represented Britain. And so he felt he was a kind of a national painter, and I think he was trying to paint a national picture. Well, I was going to ask you lots of follow-up questions,

but there's no need. You answered the lot in that one answer. It was terrific, because it was this compound, wasn't it, that I think took it to the hearts of the people. It was almost the schoolboys patriotism, there standing to Thames, watching these great ships right through the Battle of Trafalgarga, the winning of Trapar against the great enemy and so on.

And then the beautiful ship and the towing and the steam and sail against each other. that was great. Thank you very much. We'll move on. Susan. Can you describe this painting that we'd be talking about in case some people, I mean some people won't know it by how? I've got to pull out here which isn't very good but it's you don't need to say that. Right. Can you describe it please? Well it's a marine painting so it shows you two ships on the water but actually three quarters of the painting is made up of sky and this fabulous sunset. So the boats are actually concentrated on the left-hand side of the conference.

composition and Turner creates this fantastic contrast between two ships, between this great Hulk, the bulky fighting Temerere, which is represented really as a ghost because he paints it in a very pale colour. You see some masts. You see also a part of it in the front is actually broken down, but it's very pale. And then in contrast with that and overlapping it, is this black tugboat, and the tugboat is pulling it towards you, the viewer. And, of course, because it's a tug, it's a steamship, and out of the funnel is coming this burst of fiery smoke. I think you don't quite know whether this is partly flame coming from its boiler

or whether the smoke is partly being coloured by this terrific sunset on the other side of the painting. And that's what I think really draws you in. Turner is wonderful at creating these sense of immense skies that sort of disappear over your head and draw your eye to the horizon. So you're on a river, but you only get a very faint sense of the shoreline on either side, just a few buildings,

but the sunset is painted in such an immensely powerful and colourful way as to draw your eye down to the horizon and down to the distance. So I think that also adds to this sense of the drama and the sun going down and the old ship coming up the river. And then also, in contrast to the sun on the right-hand side, if you look up into the top left of the painting, you can see the crescent moon, the white moon.

And the moon is also casting a reflection on the water. So you get these terrific reflections, the sunset reflected in the water and this golden light. You get the reflections from the boats, although the steamer is churning up the water a little bit. There are these beautiful reflections. It looks very still and calm. And then the moon is also casting this rather beautiful silvery reflection on the water. James, can you describe the scene in the last journey as it really would have looked?

Because this is a poetic interpretation. As David has said, there's no evidence that he saw this. He did never claim to see it. People like to think it's in it because they like to think that these things are realistic. In fact, this was mostly imagined, although the ship was a tugboat was the tugboat in the Thames and the Thames and the Sunsets are sunset. But what actually happened? This is full must it. It's a beautiful.

That's a start now then. Start there. Well, I don't think I'm going to be controversial when I say that, you know, Turner's painting of this event wasn't, you know, wholly accurate. That's what you mean by accurate. Well, indeed. But I think one of the important things to think about when you're trying to imagine what this scene would have been like in 1838 is firstly to give some sense of just how busy the River Thames would have been with tens, if not hundreds of ships passing up and down every day, ships of all sizes from Great East Indianmen, off to the far east, down to small colliermen bringing coal from the northeast into the capital or even Watermen going about their daily business back and forth across the river, taking passengers. back and forth. So all of that would have been going on,

and you don't really get much of a sense of that in Turner's painting, just the sheer density of traffic that would have been on the river. And obviously there are other things about this painting that the Temerere is shown fully mastered, and with some sails, albeit feld, which would have been taken off before it was towed up river. But I think to focus on these points, you're sort of missing the point of the painting.

You know, Turner wasn't trying to recreate one specific event. He was trying to do something far more reflective. He hadn't gone to see the remains of it, we understand, not going up the terms, when it was taken to the Nakhers Yard, so he'd have seen the big ship without the must and so on. Exactly. I mean, as many hundreds, if not thousands of people did, when the ship was being broken up at Beetson's yard in Rothera Hive, it did become, as David's already said, a bit of a visitor attraction.

Lots of people came, visited, tried to take little mementos. One really nice example at the National Maritime Museum, we've got a beautiful barometer that's made from the wood of the Temerere. But also there was a very strong line in souvenir prints of the ship being broken up that were very popular and sold in great numbers. David Bernie Brown, how does the sky set the emotional tone of the programme? Constable said, but the sky was always the... the powered

emotion. It certainly does in this one. Can you describe how it does? And why you think it does? Well, at least half the picture is given over to the sunset. And actually the entire right half of the painting really

is empty, apart from sky and water. I mean, the Thames flows on up towards London. It's empty of ships, as James has said. empty of vessels, which of course it would not have been. It would

have been densely crowded. I mean, it took the Temerea two days working with the tides and moving very, very slowly to negotiate its way towed by two tugs, not one. Turner

shows only one. It took it two days to get from sheer nest to Rotherhithe, I believe. And one doesn't get any sense of that in the painting. It seems to be very smooth and very serene and very calm and very easy. Half the painting is given over to the sky and to this really spectacular sunset. And, of course, the setting sun conveys the idea of time, of an ending of the passing of a day

and through the passing of the day, perhaps the passing of a nera. and also, of course, the red tint of the sunset perhaps also suggests blood. I mean, I don't want to go overall Ruskinian about this, but of course, you know, Ruskin was sort of constantly talking about, you know, Turner's bloodshot skies. I mean, Turner certainly later on, painted an extremely bloodshot sky over a painting of Napoleon in exile on Saint Helena,

but I think in this painting perhaps the ruddy glow is there as a beautiful thing, but also perhaps it does evoke the appalling bloodshed that would have taken place on board the Temererea when she was actually in battle. I mean, her decks, you know, her decks would have been a wash with blood, which would have had to be washed off, hosed down and removed. She would have been an absolute blood bath. But I think that Turner loved his sunsets. He painted them all the time.

He studied them in watercolour. Even as a boy, he used to walk up to Hampstead Heath and lie on his back and make studies of the sky. We have sketchbooks at the tape that are entirely devoted to small watercolor studies following the progress of sunsets or sky effects. So he would have had a reserve of imagery in the studio to draw on to create. a sky like this. But it's there primarily, I think, as an emotional force, just as constable described. The sky could set the emotional tone of a painting. But the sunset on the one hand, and as Susan has said, equally important, is the moon,

because that does convey, as the sun sets, so the moon rises. And in the same Royal Academy exhibition in 1839, Turner showed two paintings of ancient and modern Rome in moonlight and sunlight. And he quoted Barron with one of those paintings. The moon is up and yet it is not night. The sun still divides the day with her, which is what we see realized in this painting too. Thank you very much.

I didn't see some but the sun says, you all know, 10 times more, 110 times more than that. But I think what the sunset says is this is a glorious ending. It's more about glory, it seems to me, than about. What do you think, Susan? I think you do get a sense of glory there as well as a sense of the passing of time. So it's the last glorious blaze of that sun going down

that I think you also respond to in looking at that. And at the age of sail. And certainly the work is done. The dictator has been overthrown. safety returns and that sort of thing. England goes back to being England. Yes, and I think there's no doubt that Turner had been deeply affected by that period of the Napoleonic Wars,

had everybody in England. And for him, the ending of the war represented a lifting of the restrictions on travel. He was able, for the first time, to go to Italy, to see paintings there. And that was also transformational for his practice of painting. And you see the sky there, but particularly, this. What about his, can you tell us something about his brushwork on this? Well, this is a painting that's

in really quite good condition. So when you look at the painting, you can still see the marks of Turner laying his brush on in three dimensions. If you look at it particularly in raking light when the light is falling on it at an angle, you can see exactly the texture of

the paint and the marks of the brush, for example, in that patch of brilliant red, vermilion red above the sun, that's really thickly painted. The moon, although it's small and rather delicately formed, is very thickly painted and the reflections of moonlight on the water. Again, he's using paint thickly, rather quickly, with a broad brush to give that effect. He knew exactly what he was doing. But at the same time, there are passages in the painting that are deliberately thinly painted.

The Temerere itself is rather thinly painted and not painted in immense detail. He's just using little strokes of darker brown against the pale off white to suggest the form of the ship there. And the passages of reflections in the water. Again, there's this luminosity and transparency, which I think is something that he's brought into oil painting

from his experience of watercolor painting. James, you talked about what had happened to the Temarais since its glory days. But one of the reason that this is a sort of farewell, the last, is it's a farewell to sail. It's beginnings of a farewell to sail. What is happening between the time of Trafalgar and the arrival of the tugboats from Newcastle called London and, I can't remember the other name? Samson. Thamson, London and Samson here, what called? What is happening?

Is it a recognised takeover? resisted as most takeover's hire in this country or is welcomed? What's happening? Well, the 1830s are a really interesting time for the Royal Navy. The Royal Navy is the largest naval force in the world, larger than its next few rivals added together. And the Navy really is at the centre of British interests, defending the nation from potential invasion, protecting British trade around the world. And so there's a very great nostalgia in Britain, particularly for the Navy of yesteryear and particularly for the Navy of Nelson's time.

And you see this in all kinds of manifestations, not least Trafalgar Square, which at this period is being named and subsequently there's a committee to decide what an earth they're actually going to put in this square. And of course, in the early 1840s you end up with Nelson's column, which of course still stands today. So there's this remarkable nostalgia on the one hand,

but also a growing sense of unease about this, new technological revolution, which is steam, which has the potential to completely transform the way that navies operate and the way that ships are built. The Royal Navy has been experimenting with steam vessels since the early 1800s, but it's in the 1830s that it really becomes in vogue, if you like, with the first war ships designed and constructed with steam propulsion. And the reaction to this is really divided. On the one hand, there's a lot of excitement about this new technology and how the Royal Navy is in exactly the right place to take advantage of it, but also a degree of insecurity and unease because of its potential transformational nature.

If one of Britain's rivals, perhaps France or Russia or whoever, gets ahead of the technological game, suddenly the whole Royal Navy could become obsolete. And one of the things I think is fantastic about the fighting Timorair painting is you see both of these ideas in the painting. You have the sort of patriotic nostalgia represented by the Temerere on its last voyage, but you also have the juxtaposition with the steam tug. So it's at once saying that Britain has been dominant at the seas in the past. It's dominant at sea right now, but the future is not clear. And actually, just to finish with what David was saying about the other things Turner's working on at this time.

He's fascinated by imperial decline. That's why he's painting these paintings of ancient and modern Rome. And I think he's doing something very similar in this painting. He's saying that Britain does dominate the seas, but this is not guaranteed to last forever. Can I come back to you on this question of colour again, David, because you look at it, you look at the colour. But is there more to say about his use of colour?

How has we exhausted that sort of change? Well, I mean, Turner was an extraordinarily original colourist, and his pictures were increasingly vividly coloured as he developed. I mean, if one goes to the National Gallery or one goes to the claw gallery at the Tate and one looks at the National Collection of Turner's paintings in the Turner v. Quest,

one can see how his early paintings are actually quite dark, quite somber, but they become more and more brilliant over time. He's discovering new pigments. He's discovering new pigments. He's very bold about using the new pigments he discovered. He was an early adopter of new pigments. Can you give us examples of one or two of them?

There are new pigments in this painting. I mean, if one looks at the reds, the crimson reds, the scarlets, and the yellows in this painting, which play off against each other and, of course, are melded together in the sunset. These are new pigments. I mean, in this picture, he uses two vermilions. one of which had been in use for most of his life. But the other, an iodine-based pigment, a particularly vivid scarlet that is sometimes called Red Lake, Scarlet Lake.

That was a new development recently developed by a friend of Turner's Humphrey Davy. And the yellow, an intense lemon yellow, which of course is softened out in the painting, because it's working in conjunction with other colours. But at its core, it's a new colour, that lemon yellow, a berym-based chromate yellow, that was new, very new, and something that Turner used really more than any other artist at the time and was criticised for and joked about because, you know, he said once, you know, I've taken all the yellow onto myself this year,

even as none left for you, and black was not thought to be a suitable colour of itself in painting. It was meant to be created by mixing other colours. And to show it by itself, as he does in the smoke and in the tug, was really quite new and unacceptable to many eyes. But of course, in this painting it works in juxtaposition with other colours. He was using a new cobalt blue that we can also see in the picture. And his colouring was entirely original.

Can we switch to the men who were absent? But still, he had a great nostalgia for the people who sailed the ships to sea, especially into battle. Is that right, Susan Foister? How did this play in the making of this painting? Well, he had certainly had a history of making paintings of the Battle of Trafalgar, as we've mentioned, showing the sailors. On the second occasion when he had a royal commission, he was commissioned by George VIII to paint this immense battle painting, it was absolutely full of sailors. I mean, in that way, the fighting Temerere, I suppose, is a sort of ghostly reminiscence of that battle scene full of people. but in the commission that he painted for in the first place, St James's palace, you see sailors swarming over these boats,

and you see their suffering, and you see their suffering thrust in front of you, not only with the blood, but there's one particular sailor who looks almost as though he's being crucified in front of you. So Turner certainly felt great empathy for the suffering of the sailors in these battles. And you think that this James played a part in the powerful, and often dismissed the idea of nostalgia that's in this painting, that he could rely on, as it were, the British people to fill in the sailors? Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, one of the other things that's happening in the 1830s, which I didn't mention earlier, is a great number of autobiographies that are written by sailors who are active in the Napoleonic Wars, essentially publishing their reminiscences. And quite a lot of these are quite sensationalised accounts of their life in the name, but there is a very broad popular interest, not just in what Nelson and his fellow officers were doing in this period, but also the sailors of this period too. And that's something

Turner's definitely drawn on in the past, particularly with his Battle of Trafalgar painting. Its absence from the fighting Temerere, the absence of individuals of people is very interesting, and I think you're right to say that he almost doesn't need to. And we come back to, again, what David was saying, that the Temerere was almost a living thing in and of itself. He didn't the ship was a living thing, so you didn't actually need people to populate the painting. David, people like to look at realistic painting and say they got it wrong. I mean, they look at Salisbury Cathedral and they say the rainbow couldn't have been in that place. I'm not going to look at it anymore.

We had that sort of reaction now, but there were quite a few things that you could say in the pedantic and photographic sense wrong with this painting. Can you just tell us one or two of them, starting with the sunset? Well, the sunset, of course, I mean the sun would not have been setting when the tenets. Mary arrived at Rotherhive because this was in September. And I think I'm right in saying she actually arrived at Rotherhive at about 3 o'clock in the afternoon. So to have the sun so low in the sky and the moon already halfway up is a total fantasy. But the real thing about the sun. Come on, tell the people the real thing about the problem with the sun.

But the sun's also in the wrong place. That's it. It's in the wrong place because, of course, the sun sets in the west. the temerere and the tug are quite clearly moving at least halfway in the opposite direction and not up river at all. Maybe I'm wrong, James.

No, no, not at all. There was a lot of studies in the late 19th century to try and work out if it was at all possible on one of the bends of the Thames for the Sun to be behind the Temererea, and it just isn't.

But I think we'd all agree that it's completely bizarre to expect a picture like this to be absolutely literal in those sorts of details. it is, of course, an invention. And it's coming back to the point that, you know, we were exploring earlier, the sunset is there for emotional reasons.

It's there to set the mood and the tone of the painting. It's not there because it happened at a particular time, in a particular place. The other thing that's really quite spectacularly wrong, and Turner would have known this because he travelled on steamboats all the time. He went up and down in the Thames to Margate. He went across the channel. knew exactly where a steamboat's funnel would have been positioned in relation to its boiler, i.e. over it, it would not have been up towards the bows, and a long way away from the boiler

and the paddles. It would have been centre, but Turner's moved it, so that, of course, the funnel doesn't conflict with the bow of the Temerere itself. He doesn't understand it when this was made into a print. The printer moved it back to where it should have been. The printer moved it back. He was livid. He was livid. So, right, too.

If he wants the funnel to be there, he could put the funnel there. The second edition, you know, Turner's behest was re-corrected. Put it back where he'd wanted it in the first place. How was the painting received, Susan? Well, it attracted... Start with Thackeray. Well, Thackeray was really inspired by this painting. I mean, he was...

somebody who wrote a lot about Turner's paintings and often were slightly appalled by Turner's use of colour. One of the things that made Turner controversial was that he didn't paint in the ways that people expected. He wasn't representing actuality. He wasn't a naturalistic painter. So Turner would write about the colours being pea green when they should have been red and red when they should have been pea green. but with the Temerere, he really responded to what Turner was trying to do with colour and with the story of the ship. And he was particularly taken by the tug, which he called a spiteful tugboat that was dragging the temerere to its end. And he called it a national own, didn't it? The whole painting. Yes, and like many of the critics, he found it was poetry in painting.

And that's how he responded. He also called the tug, I mean Thackeray also called the tug, the temerun. as executioner, which I think is wonderful, because of course, it humanises the tug as well as the, you know, if the Temerereur is representing Nelson's entire Navy, you know, all the people that served in it in the form of one ship. So, you know, so the tug is representing this, this thing, this creature that is actually killing all that off. James, when the tamaray was broken up, paid a lot of money for it, didn't he? the man, over £5,000 in those days. Let's not translate it, people are going to work it out to themselves.

It's incredible, man and money to pay for a Hulk. He paid that. It's broken up. What happened to it? Where did it go? Well, it remained at rather high, at Beetson's Yard, where it was broken up. Yeah, well, they were used for all sorts of things. So the story goes, a lot of houses built on both banks of the Thames

were built using timber from the Temere. And just the breaking up this ship would have taken years. It really was a long process And the fact that it took so long Is what allowed Well, in a way, yeah And that's actually what allowed it to become a visitor attraction Because it was there for so long

People had had many months if not years to come and look at it But curiousuboners, there were chairs made out of it And picture frames made with this is from the Tameraire And on and on it went There's all sorts of things around the country That are made from the wood of the Temerea I'm afraid there are more things made from the wood of the Tamerere than could possibly have originally constructed

A 98 gun ship of the life depends if you buy the 5,000 oaks, if you buy the 5,000 oaks. But certainly a lot of people kept relics of the ship and really treasured them. So, David, we're coming to an Anna. Is there a key thing that's made this, the most popular painting, the British people is their most popular painting? Is there one thing about it, or is it the compound that you so carefully gave us at the beginning of the programme? I think, for me, it's the compound, but of course I couldn't.

possibly speak for everybody else, but I think, you know, it is a great ship that speaks for an era, and I think people love this, this, this, the way in which the ship plays against the sky, the light, the colour. You can love this painting, even if you don't have in your, in your emotional and historical DNA, some sense of, you know, the hearts of oak, the great age of sail, the Navy, British sea power and so on. Susan, very briefly,

did this move turn it on as a painter? Did the painting of it make him move forward as a painter? I think it was the sort of culmination of a certain type of experimentation with paint, and he went on after that to paint even more extraordinary pictures. Thank you very much. Thank you, Susan, for us.

David Blaney Brown and James David. Next week, Byzantine Laws. We'll be discussing Justinian's Legal Code, body of law from the 6th century AD. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Did you enjoy it, by the way?

We loved it. It's great fun. All right, what did we miss out? What should we have done that we didn't cover? I suppose one thing I'm quite interested in is the contrast between the fighting Timura and his earlier painting of the Battle of Trafalgar from the 1820s

because obviously the public reception to the Battle of Trafalgar painting it got a lot of criticism particularly from naval officers for not being accurate and not at all representing one moment of the battle and trying to do something a bit more sophisticated in commonating.

That was the big painting wasn't it? Yeah, exactly. That was the big one. Not so much the first one, the 186 painting. which is for the masthead of the ship. But ironically, for the big one he painted in the 1820s, he actually did a lot of preparation, didn't he?

I mean, he specifically got, I believe, the plans of the victory in order to shape his... Yes, he did. And indeed he had those... I mean, he... You know, when he was painting the 186 picture, he actually went... As soon as she got back, you know,

as soon as the victory was brought back, a wreck, of course, after the battle for repairs. he went down to Chieness and went on board and filled a sketchbook with drawings and... Disposition of the ships. In the notes of Warnaby, you say that some of the men who worked there had made their own sketches and gave them to him and said,

look, this is where that ship was. I think they probably did, because actually if one looks at the sketchbook, you can see that actually those diagrams are not. not in his own hand. And when he went on board, of course, there was still a skeleton crew, and even some of the Marines had not yet been sent on leave or sent to hospital. You know, there was still a skeleton crew on board. And so he was able to interview them and get there on the spot accounts of the battle.

He drew a few portraits. He drew descriptions of what had happened during the battle. And he also made two larger drawings. on deck that showed, you know, the arrangement of the masts, exactly where Nelson had been shot and, you know, where the officers had come to help him and so on. And all that, of course, helps him to make the painting. He called the tamar my darling, didn't he?

He loaned it out once and he said, I'm never going to loan it out again and I'm never going to sell it. What was this? He meant it, didn't he? Yes, he absolutely did. He was apparently offered £5,000 for it, and he wouldn't take money for it. He wanted to keep it. That's almost as much as the Temerere.

Yes, I was struck by that when you mentioned that. And we know it was kept in his gallery, along with the other paintings, that he wanted to come to the nation. So after his death in 1851, there was this terrific fight about his will, but eventually his paintings came to the National Gallery. And one thing that perhaps people don't appreciate is that when the National Gallery was first built, the Royal Academy, which we've referred to where Turner showed his paintings, where he showed the Temererea in 1839, was in the National Gallery, the right-hand side of the building that we know today. So that painting was shown in Trafalgar Square, moved to his gallery,

then came back to Trafalgar Square and was put on display in 1857. Well, thank you all very much. Now we have the entry of the producer with an offer you can't refuse. Tea, coffee or tot of rum. There are more than 700 programmes to download and listen to for free from the In Our Time website. We'll also find a reading list for this episode.