The Ship That Sailed Toward an Impossible Sunset
J.M.W. Turner—“The Fighting Temeraire”
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otherhithe, London. September 1838. A once-proud warship crept up the Thames on the end of a tow rope, heading toward the scrapyard. A small steam tug pulled it along, barely a fraction of its size. |
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) was, by this point, Britain’s most celebrated landscape painter, forty years into showing at the Royal Academy. He specialized in weather, light, and water, often working small sketches up into finished paintings back in the studio, far from the actual scene.
The ship was HMS Temeraire, a 98-gun warship built from the wood of over five thousand oak trees, famous for defending Nelson’s flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. By 1838, at forty years old and stripped of her rigging, she was ordered sold and towed to a breaker’s yard to be dismantled for scrap.
This is the painting Turner made of that final journey, exhibited the following year.
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| J.M.W. Turner, “The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last berth to be broken up,” 1839. National Gallery, London. |
A pale, ghostly Temeraire drifts on the right, full masts restored by Turner’s imagination, though the real ship had already been stripped bare. A dark, smoke-belching steam tug pulls her along on the left. Behind them both, the sky burns orange, red, and mauve, one of the most admired sunsets in British painting. Her own crew, incidentally, had always called her the “Saucy” Temeraire; Turner is the one who made her “Fighting.”
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“Most deeply crimsoned sunset skies.”
John Ruskin, on the sunsets Turner painted to signify death, Modern Painters, 1843
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This is Turner himself, painted decades before the Temeraire, though even this portrait has its own small controversy.
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| J.M.W. Turner, Self-Portrait, c. 1799. Tate Britain, London. |
Painted around age twenty-three or twenty-four, likely to mark his election to the Royal Academy, this remains the image most people picture when they think of Turner. In 2026, at least one Turner scholar publicly questioned whether the sitter is really him at all, a reminder that even a two-hundred-year-old face isn’t always settled fact.
None of it happened quite this way. Records suggest the tow reached Rotherhithe in the mid-afternoon, hours before any sunset. Worse, a ship heading up the Thames toward London travels west, meaning Turner placed his glowing sun in a direction the real scene could never have shown it. Newspaper readers at the time argued about the error in print, in The Times itself.
I used to assume a painting this beloved had to be scrupulously accurate. Turner didn’t care about the actual clock. He wanted the light to carry the ship’s ending, whether or not the sun agreed to cooperate.
Turner refused every offer to buy the painting, calling it “my darling,”… and kept it until his own death in 1851, when it passed to the National Gallery as part of his bequest to the nation. In 2005, a BBC Radio 4 poll voted it Britain’s favorite painting, ahead of works by Constable and Van Gogh. It has appeared on the reverse of the British twenty-pound note.
The novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, reviewing the 1839 exhibition, called it “as grand a painting as ever figured on the walls of any academy.”
A warship being towed to its own demolition, lit by a sun that was never really there… still Britain’s favorite thing to look at, nearly two centuries later.
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