The Temeraire was a 98-gun warship that fought at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 — one of the most celebrated ships in the Royal Navy.
By 1838, it was obsolete.
It was towed from Sheerness to a breaker's yard at Rotherhithe, and Turner watched, or is said to have watched, and painted it the following year.
The painting is not quite accurate.
The sunset is behind the ship, not in the direction it was actually travelling.
The steam tug is more vivid and ominous than the real thing.
The Temeraire itself seems to glow — pale, ghostly, already half-gone.
Turner was not making a record; he was making an elegy for the age of sail, now being dragged away by steam and iron.
Turner refused to sell it and called it 'my darling.'
He left it to the nation when he died in 1851.
In 2005, it was voted the greatest painting in Britain in a public poll.
It hangs in the same room as The Hay Wain.
