This reflected contemporary reality. At the time The Fighting Temeraire was painted, the Royal Navy was increasingly using steamboats for towing bigger vessels. Moves were already afoot to replace its sail-powered fleet with new steam frigates. But the demise of the Temeraire didn’t reflect a routine upgrade in armaments. This was a one-of-a-kind revolution in seafaring. Sailors around the world had relied on wind-and-sail or oar-propulsion for thousands of years. Now, steam engines could allow seafarers to overcome the vagaries of gusts, shallows and tidal patterns – to supersede nature itself. The future was steam-powered, but how this was going to affect the future of transport, trade and naval combat was still anybody’s guess in the 1830s. What Turner did know was that as far back as Homer’s Odyssey, sailing functioned as a profound symbol of the life journey in art and literature. And so, by hitching the old and the new so unforgettably in his painting, he shows us a compelling metamorphosis – the beginning of a new, post-industrial lifecycle in human history.
Turner was awake to the responsibility of artists in times of irreversible historical change. For him, the age-old skill of depicting wooden sailing ships, their rigging, sails and ornately carved figureheads was becoming obsolete. The challenge for every artist (and every member of society) in the modern age, he realised, was to discover beauty and significance in newness, and in artefacts that had not previously been depicted in art, like iron funnels, pistons, valves, and paddle wheels. In The Fighting Temeraire, his rise to this challenge is captured in a very memorable and uncompromising symbol.
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Turner even adapted his painting technique to express the technological and social transformations in the world around him. He used newly invented paint hues like Lemon Yellow and Scarlet Lake in The Fighting Temeraire. Pigment analysis of the painting also indicates that he raided from his kitchen for substances to add his paint to achieve desired effects, like tallow, cooking fat or even salad oil.
His interest in new technology, and his search for innovative techniques with which to represent them, had a direct impact on the next generation of avant-garde painters. Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro were both wowed by Turner’s art. An engraving of Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed (which depicts a train hurtling over Maidenhead bridge) was even displayed at the first Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1874 – a pivotal event in the history of modern art.
