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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas, people and events that have shaped our world.

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Melvyn Bragg

Susan Foister

David Blayney Brown

James Davey

Simon Tillotson

In Our Time: The Fighting Temeraire

The Fighting Temeraire

10/11/2016

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Fighting Temeraire

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss JMW Turner's The Fighting Temeraire.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss The Fighting Temeraire, JMW Turner's painting of a famous ship from the Battle of Trafalgar on its way to a breakers' yard on the Thames.

This image: Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Fighting Temeraire, 1839 (c) The National Gallery, London

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss "The Fighting Temeraire", one of Turner's greatest works and the one he called his 'darling'. It shows one of the most famous ships of the age, a hero of Trafalgar, being towed up the Thames to the breakers' yard, sail giving way to steam. Turner displayed this masterpiece to a public which, at the time, was deep in celebration of the Temeraire era, with work on Nelson's Column underway, and it was an immediate success, with Thackeray calling the painting 'a national ode'.

With 

Susan Foister
Curator of Early Netherlandish, German and British Painting at the National Gallery

David Blayney Brown
Manton Curator of British Art 1790-1850 at Tate Britain

and 

James Davey
Curator of Naval History at the National Maritime Museum


Producer: Simon Tillotson.

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