Losing the Fight

Leaf 126 – Art Inspired

 

Turner - The Fighting Temeraire (1839) National Gallery UK

Not so long ago, Turner’s painting, ‘The Fighting Temeraire’ (1839), triumphantly topped the list of candidates for “the nation’s favourite work of art” as voted for by the British people. It certainly is a luminous work of art. And it is one which is steeped in symbolism. A symbolism which, I think, speaks to the mood of a nation in decline. The Romantics were right to feel wary about the onset of a rapidly industrialising modernity in the nineteenth century. They could see how easily that onset could gather enough momentum to become an onslaught. They seemed to sense how the wondrous mechanistic marvels of that new age would destroy as much, if not more, than they would ever create. A revolution that would decisively shift us out of our natural orbit. Divorced from nature, no longer beholden to the regular, rhythmic cycle of the seasons. Human nature would begin to tip the scales of environmental equilibrium. Inevitably succumbing to its own self-serving pride, becoming over-confident in its increasingly god-like powers – they could foresee how we would inevitably morph into a collectively corporeal Frankenstein’s monster. The Shelleys, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth and company, each in their own inimitable way, expressed this melancholy using a palette of words, finessed by rhyme and metre. Turner did the same, but with brushes, oil paints and a genuine palette of suitably mixed emotions. They did so staring into a reflection of a future from which we are now staring forlornly back at them.

 

 

Sailing close to the wind,

heading toward a horizon

– black as soot.

 

  

 

London Tug at Work (1931) Hulton-Deutsch