The picture is the purest phantasy, even more like a fairy-tale than
the story it illustrates. He has made the whole scene burn in the red
light of a flaming sunrise, redder by far than the sunset of the old
'Temeraire.'
The story is told of a gentleman who, looking at a picture of Turner's,
said to him, 'I never saw a sunset like that.' 'No, but don't you wish
you could?' replied Turner. That is what we feel about the sunrise
in the picture of Ulysses and Polyphemus. Next to it in the National
Gallery hangs another picture called 'Rain, Steam, and Speed'--the
Great Western Railway. From the realm of the mythical, this takes us
back to the class of scenes of which the 'Fighting Temeraire' is one,
actually beheld by Turner, but magically transfigured by his brush.
A train is coming towards us over a bridge, prosaic subject enough,
especially in 1844, when railways were supposed to be ruining the
aspect of the country and were hated by beauty-loving people. But
Turner saw romance in the swift passage of a train, and painted a
picture in which smoke and rain, cloud and sunset, river and bridge,
boats and trees, are all fused in a mist, pearly and golden as well
as smutty and grey.
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