ABSTRACT
I On 6 May 1839, the Royal Academy Exhibition opened and presented a painting that soon emerged as one of the most acclaimed and characteristic works of the period, J.M.W. Turner's 'The Fighting "Téméraire", tugged to her Last Berth to be broken up, 1838' (Figure 7.1).6 An outstanding example of both his artistic and his patriotic standing, the painting ranks among Turner's best known pieces; he seems to have himself regarded it with such affection that he declined all offers to sell it in his lifetime and only bequeathed it to the National Gallery as part of his posthumous gift to the nation. The picture is remarkable for many reasons, not least for its topicality. Though otherwise given to remote historical subjects or, especially in his famous seascapes, to broad naturalizing visions, Turner here depicts a clearly recognizable and recent scene that had taken place the previous year. On 6 September 1838, the Téméraire, a 98-gun fighting ship of the Second Rate, after forty years of service in the Royal Navy, was auctioned to a London ship-maker and tugged upriver from Sheerness to his wharf at Rotherhithe. There she was to be finally dismantled. The event, much publicized in the contemporary media, was a routine and, from the Admiralty's point of view, expedient operation to discard of old and rotting ships as long as they could still be sold for the value of their timbers. But Turner's painting places this event into a specific cultural history of the sea that has occasioned enthusiastic responses from generations of viewers, writers and admirers. At the same time, it compels us to consider how historical mythologies relate to economic factors in the formation of maritime memories and their social functioning. As a central English icon, Turner's 'Téméraire' is fighting an epic battle against cultural oblivion.
