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Файл:Практикум по культуре речевого общения искусство. Часть 1. Практикум
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the sky’s still very ominous, even catastrophic appearance; indeed, to twentieth century eyes the
vast, mush rooming thundercloud looming over the low horizon brings to mind a veritable nuclear
explosion. Finally, one curious feature is the unexpected running hare in the lower left corner,
which intriguingly anticipates the similarly unexpected hare running before the onrushing train in
Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed of 1844. This modest addition may not be pure whimsy, for it
injects a note of temporal contrast: that is, compared to the most timeless permanence of the
megaliths, the fleet hare seems as transient as the shadow of the seated man or as ephemeral as the
momentary glow of the rainbow.
What about the presence of the moon? Most probably, Constable introduced this crescent
moon simply to enhance further the evocative mood of the scene. Incidentally, this is one of the
very rare instances in his art where both solar light sources appear in one scene.
Constable himself makes a brief but revealing reference to this version of Stonehenge in a
letter: “I contemplated adding a view of Stonehenge to my book – but only a poetical one. Its literal
representation as a ‘stone quarry’ has been often enough done.” He is here differentiating his own
expressive approach from the purely descriptive, topographical one characterizing the majority of
Stonehenge views. But may also be alluding to the fact his version was a distant view rather than the
more usual close-up one. His removed, panoramic viewpoint greatly accentuates the appearance and
mood of stark isolation and lonely endless expanse. The ruin appears all the more stranded and eerie
due to the vast sea of featureless plains incorporated in the scene, bringing to mind Keats’ lines, “a
dismal cirque of Druid stones, upon a forlorn moor”.
(From Constable’s Stonehenge by Louis Hawes)
6.7. The Paradigm of the English Landscape Artist. John Constable (1776–1837) has
generally been regarded as the paradigm of the English landscape artist. Even in his own lifetime and in
spite of his general lack of recognition, he gave his name to that small tract of the Stour Valley in
Suffolk, between East Bergholt, and Dedham, which provided the subjects for so much of his
painting. The son of a wealthy miller in Bergholt he was a slow developer, and always suffered from his
family’s disapproval of his vocation as artist. Although he joined the Royal Academy Schools as a
student in 1799, he at first owed little to that institution except a belief in the supreme virtues of nature,
as expounded by Reynolds (a painter he always profoundly admired), and a love of the art of the past,
especially Gainsborough, Claude, Ruisdael and Rembrandt.
From 1802 until 1820 his art was based on an obsessive involvement with the scenery of his
native place, translated into pictures chiefly through the procedures of sketching in oils, which had
been in vogue among young English landscapists since before 1800, but which were developed by him
into a tool of unsurpassed range and refinement. Not only sketches, but also a number of exhibited
works of the 1820s seem to have been the products of outdoor painting. The crowning achievement of
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this Suffolk-based phase of Constable’s works is his most famous picture, The Hay Wain, which he
showed at the Royal Academy in 1821 under the characteristic title of Landscape: Noon.
This 6-foot canvas was, however, painted in the studio, the third of a series of large Stour
scenes designed essentially for exhibition, and specifically related to Constable’s tardy recognition
by the Royal Academy, of which he was elected an Associate only in 1819. From then onwards he
based himself in London, and Hampstead, and although he continued to paint many subjects from
Stour Valley sketches, his interests broadened to include many other parts of England, as well as
much mare purely aesthetic and even scientific problems related to landscape art. The 6-foot
canvases of the 1820s came to be worked out with the help of full-size compositional sketches; and
work on this scale concentrated Constable’s attention as never before on purely painterly
considerations. By the mid 1820s topography and even verisimilitude had ceased to play a
determining role. He became increasingly reluctant to sell his work (his private income ensured him
a living), and he seems, like Turner, to have planned a museum to house his collection. In the event,
the bulk of his studio, including an incomparable series of oil sketches, was presented in the 1880s
to the Royal Academy.
In 1829 Constable was made a full Academician, and the last years of his life were largely
spent in consolidating his reputation, by the publication of a series of mezzotint engravings by
David Lucas (1802–81) after his work, English Landscape Scenery, somewhat on the model of
Turner’s Liber Studiorum, but with ample commentaries by the artist himself. He also took to
lecturing on the subject of the history and practice of landscape, although Constable was never a
popular painter until after his death, and was rarely commissioned to paint anything but portraits
and even religious works. It is an irony that a painter who prided himself on never travelling abroad,
and who despised modern art on the Continent, should have had an important following in France,
from the early 1820s, and even in Germany from about 10 years later. Leslie’s picture of a benign
and dedicated ‘natural painter’ shaped the reception of Constable until very recent research (notable
the full publication of the correspondence) revealed a much more aggressively ambitious
personality. Renewed attention to the late work has served to emphasize the importance of
academic thinking in Constable; and studies like Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion (1960) have,
indeed, undermined the very notion of ‘natural’ painting.
6.8. Wivenhoe Park, Essex. The realistic quality of Constable’s art can be clearly sensed in this
painting. In fact Constable catches the essential character of the English landscape so convincingly that
we almost see and hear drops of rain bending the leaves of grass on the green lands.
A generation earlier it had been suggested to Gainsborough, whom Constable admired, that he
should paint the exact view of a country house. Gainsborough politely refused the commission, while
Constable considered such a commission to be a challenge. Constable’s patron wanted his beautiful
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land to be recorded faithfully on canvas; he wanted all the peculiar features of his countryside to be
fixed in paint.
For Constable the challenge consisted in meeting the patron’s demands on the one hand and on
the other hand in developing his own language in accordance with his inclination to be truthful and
poetic. And he successfully managed to cope with all the tasks he set before himself.
7. Joseph Mallord William Turner
7.1. Turner’s (1775–1851) first known watercolour was painted in 1787 and this marks
the beginning of a long career during which he prod need a succession of masterpieces unequalled in
range and power by hardly any other British artists. The range of his subjects, although confined
largely within the field of landscape, and the vast sweep of his development from his first
topographical drawings to his late evocations of light and atmosphere, to say nothing of the intrinsic
qualities of the works themselves, proclaim him one of the greatest English painters.
One of Turner’s earliest paintings (The Shipwreck, 1805) shows his absorption with the sea,
and especially the sea as it affected ships. The drama of light is not yet the dominant one; as
composition it is anchored firmly in the two repeating bright triangles of the sails, although the tilt
of these, as if in counterpoint, speaks literally of disaster. In his narrative pictures his passion for
light and colour is also somewhat subdued (Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus, 1829, Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage, 1832). In Grand Canal, Venice (1835) the weight of the black gondola seems less than
that of its shadow, Venice is drowning, awash with light.
About the same time Turner also showed one of his several recordings of The Burning of the
Houses of Parliament (1834). The scene becomes an almost superhuman vision: what is left of the
world is no more than a reflection of fire; the twin towers of Westminster Abbey (on whose ghostly
uprights the composition holds together) seem to float in the flames and the far end of the bridge to
disintegrate into them. The painting, when first shown, mystified people but the impact was so
undeniable that it was accepted.
A critic wrote about it: “The execution of the picture is curious; to look at it close, it appears
a confused mass of daubs and streaks of colour. Turner seems to paint slovenly – daubing as one
would say; yet what other painter preserves equal clearness of colour?”
But a picture shown seven years later The Snow Storm (1842) which now seems one of his
most prophetic and original paintings was not so warmly greeted. Here he had gone a bit too far ahead
of his time for his generation to be able to accept his experiment, let alone understand and be fired by
it. The Snow Storm, though even to modern eyes not immediately obvious to read, is an attempt to
convey the material power, the blind, shoving weight of the flurries of snow, spray and wave;
further, it is a curiously personal statement of triumph, of sheer survival.
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In this, as in his other works (Rain, Steam and Speed, 1844, The Fighting ‘Temeraire’,
1838) we can see Turner’s realization of an interplay between dark and light, warm and cold masses.
In his investigation of colour he anticipated in some degree the practice of the Impressionists; in some
late works when colour seems to become arbitrary m the sense that it is independent of the forms it
no longer describes, he anticipates sometimes the Fauves and more often certain of the twentieth
century purely abstract painters.
7.2. A Life-Long Passion for the Sea: Joseph Mallord William Turner. Turner did not begin
oils until he was about twenty-one his first exhibited oil-painting apparently being The Fishermen at
Sea off the Needles of 1796. It is typical of Turner to have begun the medium by attacking the
difficult problem of moonlight.
Profound as Turner’s love of the mountains was, it was scarcely so fundamental as his love
of the sea. He had been feeding his eyes on waves and storms, upon clouds and vapour. Here the
value of his splendid visual memory is evident. A wave cannot be drawn slowly and stolidly; it will
not sit still to have its portrait painted. For this reason most painters reduce their waves as a whole
to a formula. Turner alone by constant observation and by a consequent thorough knowledge of
wave forms and of the rules that they obey has given to his seas mass and weight as well as
movement The Sea in itself absorbed him, but especially the sea as it affected ships. To a sailor, and
Turner was at heart a sailor, a ship is a living creature, courageous and loyal, resourceful, yet
pathetically in need of help. Her curves, like those of a human figure, are beautiful because they are
of use. In drawing ships Turner shows a knowledge that springs from love; his actual manual
dexterity, which is always remarkable, being never more astonishing than when he is firmly yet
delicately delineating masts and rigging. If Turner sympathized with ships, he sympathized equally
with the men within them and loved to depict fishermen pulling at oars or sailors grappling with
ropes. He only cared in fact to portray the mood of the sea as it affected the experiences of man.
Calais Pier is one of Turner’s grandest creations. The more it is studied the more actual the
vision of a storm becomes. An immense amount of detail has been brought together, but not more
than Turner’s phenomenal memory might have retained. In obedience to what he has seen, Turner
has defined the nearer figures on the pier more sharply, and has allowed the farther groups to fade
into vagueness and darkness, renewing the emphasis again upon the people in the boat in the centre,
which is lit by a gleam of sunlight. The composition gains unity from the concentration in the centre
of the picture of two masses of light upon the sky above and upon the waves below, which are both
joined by the light upon the sail of the central boat, while the scene is more real, because of
Turner’s complete knowledge of how the various crafts are tossed and swayed and borne up in a
storm. Those who look at the picture can smell the spray and hear the din of the water and the shout
of the deafening wind.
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A study of Calais Pier should vindicate Turner as a draughtsman of human beings. All the
figures are living individuals, from the lady in purple whose dress is blown back by the wind, to the
angry fisherman, whose wife hides the cider behind the rail of the pier.
After his continental tour in 1802, his eyes seemed to have been opened to the beauty of a
type of English scenery that he had hitherto neglected. Up till now he had painted mainly ruins,
stormy seas, and frowning mountains now he began to choose subjects from agricultural or pastoral
country and often from scenes with trees and water. If the spirit of his earlier works was akin to
Byron’s, this new mood might be called Wordsworthian, though Turner had probably not read
Wordsworth’s poetry, but rather was inspired, like the poet, by the spirit belonging to the age.
Turner’s characteristic works of this new phase (1805–1813) are painted without a hint of
that self-conscious theatricality that was his most serious failing, in close communion with Nature.
His greatest masterpieces of the period are Windsor and Sun Rising through Vapour.
In Windsor the bare tree on the left has been drawn with the utmost care and precision
without any loss to its general poise or to its relation to the atmosphere. Its supple growth and the
free irregular shapes of the other trees make the happiest of foils to the distant mass of the castle,
whose vertical and horizontal contours are purposely emphasized. A similar contrast is repeated in
the foreground between the more mobile figures and the rectangular group of animals, so that every
detail in the picture plays its part in the composition.
Unfortunately some of the delicacy of tones is lost in a reproduction; and only in the original
do the trees and castle appear completely substantial. Colour, as well as tone, has produced this
effect of distance, of mist and of growing sunlight. The colour has in general a golden warmth, to
which the eye must become accustomed before the truth of such tints as the cloaks of the two
stooping old women, one red and one purple, can be fully appreciated.
The year 1829 was a turning point in Turner’s career. About then he began to adopt his final,
and in many ways his most original style as a colourist. In 1829 Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus was
exhibited. Turner had then already begun to use in oil the gorgeous colour schemes with which he
had earlier experimented in water-colour, and which were the marked characteristic of the last
twenty years of his life. From then till 1845 he painted what are in many ways his most original
masterpieces. Hitherto his work had been in some sense traditional; with his unique powers of
observation and invention he had perfected the kind of painting for which Claude and Poussin, the
Dutch masters, Gainsborough and Crome arid the English water-colourists culminating in Girtin
had prepared the way. He had surpassed them indeed in their own field, but had not appreciably
departed from their aims. Now at the age of 54 his works began to be in a style for which there was
absolutely no precedent.
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After over forty years of severe discipline, as a draughtsman, his hold upon structure has
begun to relax; and he is now absorbed exclusively in rendering colour, light and atmosphere.
In some cases, especially after 1840, Turner’s inspirations were of too vague a nature to be
translated into a picture; of this Light and Colour of 1844, is an example.
1838 is the date of the Fighting Temeraire. If any one of Turner’s works had to be chosen to
exemplify the rest and to sum up all his powers it would have to be this. It contains all the definite
drawing, of his earlier works without any loss of colour; and all the glory of the later colour without
any vagueness. It has all his splendour of invention, with all his depth of feeling. It is significant
that he refused to sell it and that it is said to have been his favourite among his works. The beautiful
golden battle-ship, whose days are over, her mast slightly swaying, is being towed to her last resting
place by an ugly modern snorting tug, which belches forth hot brown smoke. Those who have seen
sunsets over the sea will easily believe in the truth of the magnificent colours in the sky. Here again
as in Frosty Morning, Turner has painted an effect of the passing of time; but while in the earlier
picture light is increasing, here the sun is sinking; the day is tired; little flecks of dark are rising in
the sky; the young moon has already dimly appeared; the darkness is gathering and soon the colours
will fade.
In painting marine subjects, Turner always retained the severity of his earlier drawings. His
knowledge of mass and volume as well as of the rhythmic movement of natural forces can be seen
in the apparently chaotic Snowstorm of 1842. In order to witness the effect, though he was sixty–
seven years old, he had himself lashed to the mast of the ship Ariel. The convincing reality of this
record is one of the many proofs of his unerring powers of visual memory.
The vast total quantity of Turner’s work is also one of the marks of his genius.
(From English Painting from the Seventh Century to the Present by Ch. Johnson)
7.3. Joseph Mallord William Turner. English Romantic landscape painter whose
expressionists studies of light, colour, and atmosphere were unmatched In their range and sublimity.
His marine paintings are particularly notable.
Turner was the son of a barber, but nothing is known about his mother except that she died
insane in 1804. At the age of 10 Turner was sent to live with an uncle at Brentford, Middlesex,
where he attended school. Several drawings dated as early as 1787 are sufficiently professional to
corroborate the tradition that his father used to sell the boy’s work to his customers. After some
instruction under Thomas Malton, a topographical watercolourist, Turner entered the Royal
Academy schools in 1789 and soon began exhibiting his watercolours there. He used to spend the
summer holidays touring the country in search of subjects for his sketchbooks, which he filled with
drawings to be worked up later into finished watercolours. His early work is topographical
(concerned with the accurate depiction of places) in character and imitative of the best English
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masters of the day. In 1794 Turner began working for engravers, supplying designs for the Copper
Plate Magazine and the Pocket Magazine. Engraved views of picturesque ruins of castles and
abbeys were much in demand at the time. He was also employed at making copies or elaborations
of unfinished drawings by the recently deceased landscape painter Robert Cozens. The influence of
Cozens and of the Welsh landscape painter Richard Wilson helped broaden Turner’s outlook and
revealed to him a more poetic and imaginative approach to landscape, which he would pursue to the
end of his career with ever increasing brilliance.
From 1796 Turner began to exhibit oil paintings as well as watercolours at the Royal
Academy. The first one, Fishermen at Sea, is a moonlight scene and was acclaimed by a
contemporary critic as the work “of an original mind”. In 1799, at the youngest permitted age (24),
Turner was elected an associate of the Royal Academy, and in 1802 he became a full academician,
a dignity he marked by a series of large pictures in which he emulated the achievements of the old
masters, especially the XVII century painters Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Aelbert Cuyp, and
the Van de Velde. He took his duties seriously, attending academic functions regularly, filling
various offices, and ultimately bequeathing 20,000 to the Academy, He was helpful and
encouraging to other artists insofar as his shyness and brusque manner allowed. In 1807 he was
appointed professor of perspective. His Infrequent lectures were said to have been difficult to
follow but worth it for his diagrams. About 1800 Turner took a studio at 64 Harley Street, London,
and in 1804 opened a private gallery, where he continued to show his latest work for many seasons,
He was by this time overwhelmed with commissions, and the success of his career was assured.
In 1800 Turner’s mother became hopelessly ill and was committed to a mental hospital. His
father came to live with him and devoted the rest of his life to serving as a studio assistant and
general agent. Turner’s private life, such as it was, was secretive, unsociable, and somewhat
eccentric. In 1798 he entered into an affair, which was to last about 10 years, with Sarah Danby, a
widow who bore him two children. As he never married, was close with money, and devoted his
time almost entirely to his art, he was able to amass a considerable fortune.
Turner continued to travel in search of inspiration. His travels took him in 1797 to Yorkshire
and the Lake District, in 1798 to Wales again, in 1801 to Scotland, and in 1802 to the European
continent for the first time, The crossing to Calais was rough, and in his picture Calais Pier (1802–
03; The National Gallery, London) he left a vivid record of his experience on arrival. He made more
than 400 drawings during this tour of France and Switzerland and continued for many years after to
paint pictures of scenes that had impressed him on the tour; the most important of these are three
pictures of Bonneville, Savoy. (1803 and 1812); The Festival upon the Opening of the Vintage at
Macon (1803; The Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield); the water-colours Devil’s Bridge and The Great
Falls of the Reichenbach (1804; The Cecil Higgins Museum, Bedford); Falls of the Rhine at
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Schaffhausen (1806; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston); and Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army
Crossing the Alps (1812; The Tate Gallery, London),
Turner’s many sea pieces, in which he surpasses the Dutch XVII century marine painters,
reveal his methodical attempt to master every landscape style he admired and the ease with which
he accomplished this. The rivalry he felt with painters who had influenced his style – Poussin,
Wilson, and Claude, for example – is suggested by his bequest to the National Gallery of his Dido
Building Carthage, or the Rise of the Carthaginian Empire» (1815) and Sun Rising Through
Vapour: Fishermen Cleaning and Selling Fish (1807) on condition that they be hung beside his two
favourite Claudes. The treatment of landscape in the oil Thames sketches of about 1807 and The
Shipwreck (1805; The Tate Gallery) suggests that at this time Turner was developing his original
approach to landscape – emphasizing luminosity, atmosphere, and romantic, dramatic subjects.
In 1307 Turner began his great enterprise of publishing a series of 100 plates known as the
Liber Studiorum. His aim was to perpetuate the great variety and range of his work; some of the
subjects were taken from existing paintings and watercolours; others were specially designed for the
Liber. He employed several engravers, although he supervised the work at every stage, etched some
of the plates himself, and made innumerable preparatory drawings. The publication was issued in
parts consisting of five plates each, covering all the styles of landscape composition, such as
historical, architectural, mountainous, pastoral, and marine. The first part appeared in June 1807 and
the last in 1819, when Turner evidently lost interest in the project and abandoned it after the
publication of 71 plates.
7.4. Turner. Middle years. During the second decade of the 1800s, Turner’s painting
became increasingly luminous and atmospheric in quality. Even in paintings of actual places, as St.
Mawes at the Pilchard Season (1812; The Tate Gallery) and the two pictures of Oxford painted
between 1809 and 1812 (exhibited in 1812), the hard facts of topography are diffused behind pearly
films of colour; other pictures, such as Frosty Morning (1813; The Tate Gallery), are based entirely
on effects of light. Among the most ethereal landscapes of this period are Lake of Geneva (1810;
The Los Angeles County Museum), Crossing the Brook (1815; The Tate Gallery), and England;
Richmond Hill, on the Prince Regent’s Birthday (1819; The Tate Gallery), one of his largest and
most ambitious pictures. Turner was much in demand as a painter of castles and countryseats for
their owners. Two examples of such paintings Somer Hill, Tunbridge and Linlithgow Palace (1810;
The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). He also continued to excel in marine painting, one of the most
ambitious works being Wreck of a Transport Ship (1810; The Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon).
With Dido and Aeneas, Leaving Carthage on the Morning of the Chase (1814; The Tate
Gallery), Turner began a series of Carthaginian subjects. The last exhibits of his life, at the
Academy in 1850, included four works on the same theme. By appending long poetic quotations
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either from James Thomson’s Seasons, from works by Lord Byron, John Milton, William
Shakespeare, and Alexander Pope, or from his own long poetic composition Fallacies of Hope,
Turner showed that he regarded the literary-historical interpretation of his works as of paramount
importance.
As if he felt that he had done all he could with the beauty of his native country, Turner set
out in the summer of 1819 on his first visit to Italy, He spent three months in Rome – visited
Naples, Florence, and Venice and returned home in midwinter. During his journey he made about
1,500 drawings, and in the next few years he painted a series of pictures inspired by what he had
seen, They show a great advance in his style, particularly in the matter of colour, which becomes
purer, more prismatic, with a general heightening of key. A comparison of The Bay of Balae, with
Apollo and the Sibyl (1823; The Tate Gallery) with any of the earlier pictures reveals a far more
iridescent treatment resembling the transparency of a watercolour, The shadows are as colourful as
the lights, and he achieves contrasts by setting off cold and warm colours instead of dark and light tones.
During the 1820s, tours of the continent alternated with visits to various parts of England
and Scotland, In 1825 Turner revisited The Netherlands and Belgium and the following year the
Heuse, Moselle, and Loire rivers. Notable among the pictures of this period are such views as The
Harbor of Dieppe, Cologne: The Arrival of a Packet Boat; Evening, and Mortlake Terrace: Early
Summer Horning (Frick Collection, New York City). In 1827 he painted the brilliant sketches of the
regatta now at the Tate Gallery, and in 1828 he went to Italy again. After his father’s death in 1829,
Turner often visited the Earl of Egremont at Petworth, Sussex, His splendid sketches of Petworth
probably belong to the early 1830s.
7.5. The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to her Last Berth to be Broken Up. 1839. The
National Gallery, London. “Here is genius... a work of great effect and feeling, worthy of Turner
when he was Turner.” So wrote an early Victorian critic of the artist’s marine masterpiece The
Fighting Temeraire Tugged to her Last Berth to be Broken Up. This pictorial elegy to an illustrious
but obsolescent Man O’War has proved to be Turner’s most continuously admired late work ever
since its debut at the Royal Academy in May 1839. Turner himself considered it his special
favourite during his last years, even referring to it as “my darling” and emphatically refusing
repeated generous offers of purchase.
The early Victorian London press lavished enthusiastic praise on the Temeraire, as did the
public. One reason for this was that to most eyes the work appeared much more carefully finished
than was usually the case with Turner at this time. The central reason, however, was its theme,
consecrating as it did the renowned ninety-eight-gun battleship that had played a crucial role in
Nelson’s victory off Cape Trafalgar thirty-four years earlier. As one reviewer put it, “next to the
Victory, Nelson’s flagship, we have the Fighting Temeraire”. The painting revived in many English
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hearts the stirring memory of their country’s proudest naval triumph, a memory all the more stirring
for being tinged with a nostalgic awareness of a suddenly bygone glorious era; for the heroic, threedecker “First Rate” of Georgian times was now becoming a thing of the past – “the wooden walls of
old England” soon to be replaced by the steam-assisted, iron-clad ship. It was consistent with this
that one particular element in the picture drew frequent comment – the magnificent sunset. Even
more than the beauty and skill with which this motif was rendered, its thematic appropriateness was
stressed – the sun was setting on the career of the Temeraire.
Best exemplifying the latter was the lively description by the young Thackeray, writing
under the pseudonym “Michael Angelo Fitmarsh, Esq”. After speaking of the “noble river-piece” as
not only the best picture in the exhibition, he characterized its subject and mood. “The old
Temeraire is dragged to her last home by a little, spiteful, diabolical steamer. A mighty red sun,
amidst a host of flaring clouds, sinks to rest... The little demon of a steamer is belching out a
volume of foul, lurid red hot malignant smoke, paddling furiously, and lashing up the water round
about it; while behind it (a cold grey moon looking down on it), slow, sad, and majestic, follows the
brave old ship, with death, as it were written on her... Turner makes you see and think of a great
deal more than the objects before you...”
The subject is one that Turner actually witnessed. Turner happened to return from Margate
on the same packet steamer on the very day that the Temeraire was towed up the Thames from
Sheerness to the Beatson ship-breaking yard at Rotherhithe (September 6, 1838). In the midst of “a
great blazing sunset” the old ship appeared, drawn by two tugs. The painting, therefore, had its
inception in a first-hand experience, however expressively enhanced this became under the painter’s
transforming brush.
In Turner’s richly suggestive rendering of the subject, the still lofty but powerless ship and
the small but aggressive steam-tug are maximally contrasting motifs. The former is much less
distinct, seeming enveloped in a mysterious veil of mist and exhibiting a ghostly pallor, which tends
to lift it out of the prosaic immediate world. Compared to the brazenly vivid tug with its flag flying
high, performing its task with almost eager dispatch, the now gunless and flagless Temeraire
presents a special appearance, a veritable Coleridgean ghost-ship. In particular, the somewhat
oversize, web-like prow, which the actual Temeraire apparently did not have, has an apparitional
quality, like some skeletal hulk built of giant dry bones. This phantasmal look is reinforced by the
ship’s riding high in the water, as though no longer subject to earthly gravity; for while this effect
could partly be attributed to the removal of the heavy ornament, stores and crew, Turner was
certainly not averse to heightening the proportion of a three-decker, on occasion. Contrasting more
quietly with the great ship than does the hustling tug is the distant square-rigger, outward bound
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