The Fighting Temeraire

Turner showed this at the Royal Academy in 1839, in the same exhibition as his Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino. It records an event of September 1838: the Temeraire, a 98-gun warship that had fought at Trafalgar in 1805, was towed up the Thames by steam tug to a breaker's yard at Rotherhithe and dismantled. Turner treated the facts freely — the ship's masts had already been removed before the tow, and two tugs did the work rather than one. He refused every offer for the painting, once turning down a blank cheque, called it his "darling", and left it with the rest of his studio to the British nation on his death in 1851. Turner was born in London in 1775, the son of a barber, entered the Royal Academy Schools at fourteen and was elected a full Academician at twenty-seven. He and John Constable were the two poles of British landscape painting and open rivals at the Academy: in 1832 their pictures hung side by side, Turner added a spot of red to his own to compete with Constable's brighter canvas, and Constable remarked that Turner "has been here, and fired a gun." The American painter Thomas Cole called at Turner's London studio in 1831 and carried what he saw there back into the landscape painting of the United States. The pictures Turner willed to the country went on public display in London, where Claude Monet came to study them during the winter of 1870–71.