Nanny and Child

The Fighting Temeraire, painted in 1839, depicts the HMS Temeraire - a veteran warship of the Battle of Trafalgar - being towed up the Thames by a small steam tug to the ship-breaking yard, where she will be dismantled for scrap. The great ship's sails are furled; she moves not under her own power but as cargo, pulled by the dirty, smoking tug that represents the future. The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1839, where it was instantly recognized as a masterpiece and a poignant commentary on the passing of the age of sail. Turner, who had painted the sea all his life, here transformed a marine painting into an elegy: the Temeraire's ghostly pale form, lit by a sunset of extraordinary beauty, floats above the water like a spirit departing the world of the living. The painting's symbolism has been read in multiple ways: as a lament for the passing of heroic age, as a commentary on the destructive power of industrialization, and as a meditation on mortality itself. Turner himself said nothing to limit these readings. The sunset, the most spectacular in all his work, may illuminate a death or a birth - or both simultaneously.

The Fighting Temeraire became the most beloved painting in Britain, voted the nation's greatest painting in a 2005 BBC poll. Its image of a heroic past being towed to destruction by an inglorious present resonated with every subsequent generation that experienced the loss of greatness, from the Victorians to the post-imperial present.

This painting is Turner's most emotionally direct work: an image of loss so powerful that it transcends its specific subject to become a universal statement about the passing of all beautiful things. The Temeraire, ghostly and luminous, is every great thing that time will destroy - and the sunset that illuminates her is the beauty that makes loss unbearable.