THE "FIGHTING" TEMERAIRE

Otago Witness, Issue 2666, 19 April 1905, Page 76

THE "FIGHTING" TEMERAIRE

Turner painted his famous picture, iha '' Fighting' Teni'Taire,"' by the nierest accident. It was the outcome of a happy chf-nce, the result of a casual mooting with the old ship at a water-picnic on the Thamts oik* autumn evening of the year 1838. Turner, wizh Clark^on Staafield and some friends, was boating off Greenwich Marshes in Blaekwall Reach when the old s-hip passed them, coming up the river from Sheerness, to meet her destined end off Rothcrhithe, where the ship-breaker Bsatson's men waiting for her. She had been sold out of the service some days before* fo. not quite £5530, barely the market value of the copper holts tha< held her timbers together— jrst a twelfth of the prime cost of the. ship's hull ir labour end materials, or onetwentieth of the total value" of the ship, gunned and equipped for sea.

Forlori enough, and a thing for pity, looked the grand old man-of-war as the Sheerness men had left her. her sails stripped from the yards, her tiers of ports ■without gxuis and closed down, her hull with its last coat of dockyard drab all rustylooking and weather-stained, cast off and discarded, as it were a broken warrior being borne to a- pauper's grave.

Two tujs had the ship in tow, as contemporary accounts of the Temeraire's arrival in the river relate, not one-, as Turner has painted the memorable scene. In Tuiner's picture the Temeraire is shown passing the wat&r-party before she rounded the Isle of Dogs, when heading south-south-east up Blaekwall Reach, with the September sun setting aster r of the ship to the north-%vest.

" There's a fin© picture, Turner." said Stansfield, pointing to the war-worn veteran of the sea. ;s she made hex way past them, and Turner went home full of ti;e idea to reproduce the scene on canvas, with touches of his own —to give the world a picture "of all pictures not involving human pain." says Ruskin, "the mest pathetic that ever was painted." — Fraser's "Famous Fighters of the Fleet." '