Enter J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), Britain’s greatest nineteenth-century artist and the first subject of my second pairing. Early in his career, in
1806, Turner painted a conventionally heroic scene of the conflict:
The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the
Victory. We see Nelson, surrounded by his officers and dying on deck. The
Temeraire
stands in the background, firing away at the
Fougueux.
Late in his career, in 1839, Turner returned to the ships of Trafalgar and depicted a very different scene, magnificent
in philosophical and emotional meaning, and one of the world’s most popular paintings ever since:
The Fighting
Temeraire,
Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken Up, 1838.
The large men-of-war, with their three major tiers of guns, were beautiful, terrible (in the old sense of inspiring terror), and awesome fighting machines. The
Temeraire
, constructed of oak, was built at Chatham and launched in
1798. The ship carried a crew of 750, far more than needed to sail the ship (with a gundeck 185 feet in length), but required to operate the ninety-eight guns—for each gun employed several men in elaborate procedures of loading, aiming, firing, and controlling the recoil. But these “hearts of oak” (the favored patriotic name for the great men-of-war) fell victim to their own success. Their supremacy
removed the threat of future war, while advancing technologies of steam and iron soon outpaced their wood and sails. These ships never fought again after the Napoleonic wars, and most were reduced to various workaday and unsentimental duties in or near port. The
Temeraire
, for example, was decommissioned in 1812 and then served as a floating prison and a victualing station.
Eventually, as timbers
rotted and obsolescence advanced, these great vessels were stripped and sold to ship breakers to be dismantled for timber, plank by plank. John Beatson, a ship breaker at the yards of Rotherhithe, bought the
Temeraire
at auction for 5,530 pounds. Two steam tugs towed the hulk of the
Temeraire
fifty-five miles from Sheerness to Rotherhithe in September 1838.
Turner’s painting presents a wrenchingly
dramatic view, quite inaccurate in an entirely studied way, of the
Temeraire
’s last sad trip. The great man-of-war, ghostly white, still bears its three masts proudly, with light rigging in place, and sails furled on the yards. The small steam tug, painted dark red to black, stands in front, smoke belching from its tall stack to obscure part of the
Temeraire
’s mast behind. One of Turner’s most
brilliant sunsets—with clear metaphorical meaning—occupies the right half of the painting. The most majestic and heart-stopping product of the old order sails passively to her death, towed by a relatively diminutive object of the new technology. John Ruskin wrote: “Of all pictures not visibly involving human pain, this is the most pathetic that ever was painted.”
Turner clearly set his scene
for romance and meaning, not for accuracy. Ships sold for timber were always demasted, so the
Temeraire
sailed to her doom as a hulk without masts, sails, or rigging of any sort—a most uninspiring, if truthful, image. Moreover, Rotherhithe lies due west of Sheerness, so the sun never could have set
behind
the
Temeraire
!
A simplistic and evidently false interpretation has often been presented
for Turner’s painting—one that, if true, would establish bitter hostility between art and science, thus subverting the aim of this essay: to argue that the two fields, while legitimately separate in some crucial ways, remain bound in ties of potentially friendly and reinforcing interaction. In this adversarial interpretation, recalling Blake’s contrast of “dark Satanic mills” with “England’s green
and pleasant land,” the little steam tug is a malicious enemy—a symbol of technology’s power to debase and destroy all that previous art had created in nobility. In a famous, if misguided, assessment, William Makepeace Thackeray (one of the thirty-eight in Gilbert’s recipe for a heavy dragoon), wrote in 1839, when Turner first displayed his painting:
“The Fighting Temeraire”—as grand a picture
as ever figured on the walls of any academy, or came from the easel of any painter. The old Temeraire is dragged to her last home by a little, spiteful, diabolical steamer . . . The little demon of a steamer is belching out a volume . . . of foul, lurid, red-hot malignant smoke, paddling furiously, and lashing up the water around it; while behind it . . . slow, sad and majestic, follows the brave
old ship, with death, as it were, written on her.
This reading makes little sense because Turner, like so many artists of the nineteenth century, was captivated by new technologies, and purposefully sought to include them in his paintings. In fact, Turner had a special fascination for steam, and he clearly delighted in mixing the dark smoke of the new technology with nature’s lighter daytime
colors.
In
Turner: The Fighting
Temeraire, art historian Judy Egerton documents Turner’s numerous, and clearly loving, paintings of steam vessels—starting with a paddle-steamer shown prominently in a painting of Dover Castle in 1822 (passenger steamboats only started to operate between Calais and Dover in 1821), and culminating in a long series of paintings and drawings featuring steamboats on
the Seine, and done during the 1830s. A perceptive commentator, writing anonymously in the
Quarterly Review
in 1836, praised Turner for creating “a new object of admiration—a new instance of the beautiful—the upright and indomitable march of the self-impelling steamboat.” He then specifically lauded “the admirable manner in which Turner, the most ideal of our landscape painters, has introduced
the steamboat in some views taken from the Seine.”
This reviewer then credits Turner for his fruitful and reinforcing union of nature and technology:
The tall black chimney, the black hull, and the long wreath of smoke left lying on the air, present, on this river, an image of life, and of majestic life, which appears only to have assumed its rightful position when seen amongst the simple and
grand productions of nature.
The steam tug in
The Fighting
Temeraire is not spiteful or demonic. She does not mock her passive burden on the way to destruction. She is a little workaday boat doing her appointed job. If Turner’s painting implies any villain, we must surely look to the bureaucrats of the British Admiralty who let the great men-of-war decay, and then sold them for scrap.
Which
brings me to Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the engineer who goes with Turner in my second pairing. How many of you know his name? How many even recognized the words as identifying a person, rather than a tiny principality somehow never noticed in our atlas or stamp album? Yet one can make a good argument—certainly in symbolic terms for the enterprise he represented, if not in actuality for his personal
influence—that Isambard Kingdom Brunel was the most important figure in the entire nineteenth-century history of Britain.
Brunel was the greatest practical builder and engineer in British industrial history—and industry powered the Victorian world, often setting the course of politics as firmly as the routes of transportation. Brunel (1806–1859) built bridges, docks, and tunnels. He constructed
a floating armored barge, and designed the large guns as well, for the attack on Kronstadt during the Crimean War. He built a complete prefabricated hospital, shipped in sections to the Crimea in 1855.
But Brunel achieved his greatest impact in the world of steam, both on land and at sea—and now we begin to grasp the tie to Turner. He constructed more than one thousand miles of railroad in Great
Britain and Ireland. He also built two railways in Italy and served as adviser for other lines in Australia and India. In the culmination of his career, Brunel constructed the three greatest steam vessels of his age, each the world’s largest at launching. His first, the
Great Western
, establishes the symbolic connection with Turner and
The Fighting
Temeraire. The
Great Western
, a wooden paddle-wheel
vessel 236 feet in length and weighing 1,340 tons, was the first steamship to provide regular transatlantic service. She began her crossings in 1838, the year of the
Temeraire
’s last tow and demise. In fact, on August 17, 1838, the day after the sale of the
Temeraire
, the
Great Western
arrived in New York and the
Shipping and Mercantile Gazette
declared that “the whole of the mercantile world
. . . will from this moment adopt the new conveyance.” The little tug in Turner’s painting did not doom or threaten the great sailing ships. Brunel’s massive steam vessels signaled the inevitable end of sail as a principal and practical method of oceanic transport.
Brunel went on, building bigger and better steamships. He launched the
Great Britain
in 1844, an iron-hulled ship 322 feet long,
and the first large steam vessel powered by a screw propeller rather than side paddles. Finally, in 1859, Brunel launched the
Great Eastern
, with a double iron hull and propulsion by both screws and paddles. The
Great Eastern
remained the world’s largest steamship for forty years. She never worked well as a passenger vessel, but garnered her greatest fame in laying the first successful transatlantic
cable. Brunel, unfortunately, did not live to see the
Great Eastern
depart on her first transoceanic voyage. He suffered a serious stroke on board the ship, and died just a few days before the voyage.
Turner and Brunel are bound by tighter connections than the fortuitous link of the
Temeraire
’s demise with the inauguration of regular transoceanic service by the
Great Western
in the same year
of 1838. Turner also loved steam in its major manifestation on land—railroads. In 1844, his seventieth year, Turner painted a canvas that many critics regard as his last great work:
Rain, Steam, and Speed—The Great Western Railway.
Brunel built this two-hundred-mile line between London and Birmingham between 1834 and 1838 (and then used the same name for his first great steamship). Turner’s painting
shows a train, running on Brunel’s wide seven-foot gauge, as the engine passes over the Maidenhead Railway Bridge, another famous construction, featuring the world’s flattest brick arch, as designed and built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The trains could achieve speeds in excess of fifty miles per hour, but Turner has painted a hare running in front of the engine—and, though one can’t be sure,
the hare seems poised to outrun the train, not to be crushed under “the ringing grooves of change,” to cite Tennyson’s famous metaphor about progress, inspired by the poet’s first view of a railroad.
We revere Turner, and rightly so. But why has the name of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, as inspired in engineering as Turner in painting, as influential in nineteenth-century history as any person in
the arts, slipped so far from public memory? I do not know the full answer to this conundrum, but the myth of inexorability in discovery, ironically fostered by science as a source of putative prestige, has surely contributed by depicting scientists as interchangeable cogs in the wheel of technological progress—as people whose idiosyncracy and individual genius must be viewed as irrelevant to an inevitable
sequence of advances.
Art and science are different enterprises, but the boundaries between them remain far more fluid and interdigitating, and the interactions far richer and more varied, than the usual stereotypes proclaim. As a reminder of both overlaps and differences, I recently read the first issue of
Scientific American
—for August 28, 1845, and republished by the magazine to celebrate
its 150th anniversary.
Scientific American
was founded by Rufus Porter, a true American original in eccentric genius and entrepreneurial skill. Porter had spent most of his time as an itinerant mural painter, responsible for hundreds of charming and primitively painted landscape scenes on the interior walls of houses throughout New England. Yet he chose to start a journal devoted primarily to
the practical side of science in engineering and manufacturing. In fact, the initiating issue features, as the main article, a story about the first landing in New York of “the greatest maratime [
sic
] curiosity ever seen in our harbour”—none other than Brunel’s second ship, the
Great Britain.
“This mammoth of the ocean,” Porter writes, “has created much excitement here as well as in Europe . .
. During the first few days since her arrival at New York, she has been visited by about 12,000 people, who have paid 25 cents for the gratification.”
If an artist could initiate a leading journal in science, if Turner could greatly enhance his painted sunsets by using a new pigment, iodine scarlet, just invented by Humphrey Davy of the Royal Institution, a leading scientific laboratory founded
by Count Rumford in 1799, then why do we so consistently stress the differences and underplay the similarities between these two greatest expressions of human genius? Why do we pay primary attention to the artist’s individuality, while constantly emphasizing the disembodied logic of science? Aren’t these differences of focus mostly a matter of choice and convention, not only of evident necessity?
The individuality of scientists bears respect and holds importance as well. I do accept that we would now know about evolution even if Darwin had never been born. But the discovery would then have been made by other people, perhaps in different lands, and surely with dissimilar interests and concerns—and these potential variations in style may be no less profound or portentous than the disparity
between such artistic contemporaries as Verdi and Wagner.
I do not deny that the accumulative character of scientific change—the best justification for a notion of progress in human history—establishes the major difference between art and science. I found a poignant reminder within a small item in the first issue of
Scientific American.
An advertisement for daguerreotypes on the last page includes
the following come-on: “Likenesses of deceased persons taken in any part of the city and vicinity.” I then remembered a book published a few years ago on daguerreotypes of dead children—often the only likeness that parents would retain of a lost son or daughter. (Daguerreotypes required long exposures, and young children could rarely be enticed to sit still for the requisite time—but the dead
do not move, and daguerreotypists therefore maintained a thriving business, however ghoulish by modern standards, in images of the deceased, particularly of children.)