Fraser's Magazine, June 1839

The Fighting Teméraire - as grand a painting as ever figured on the walls of any Academy, or came from the easel of any painter. The old Teméraire is dragged to her last home by a little, spiteful, diabolical steamer. A mighty red sun, amidst a host of flaring clouds, sinks to rest on one side of the picture, and illumines a river that seems interminable, and a countless navy that fades away into such a wonderful distance as never was painted before. The little demon of a steamer is belching out a volume (why do I say a volume? not a hundred volumes could express it) of foul, lurid, red-hot, malignant smoke, paddling furiously, and lashing up the water round about it; while behind it (a cold grey moon looking down on it), slow sad, and majestic, follows the brave old ship, with death, as it were, written on her... herein surely likes the power of the great artist. He makes you see and think of a great deal more than the objects before you; he knows how to soothe or to intoxicate, to fire or to depress, by a few notes, or forms or colours, of which we cannot trace the effect to the source, but only acknowledge the power... when the art of translating colours into music or poetry shall be discovered [Turner's Teméraire ] will be found to be a magnificent national ode or piece of music.

I must tell you, however, that Mr Turner's performances are for the most part quite incomprehensible to me; and that his other pictures... Cicero at his Villa, Agrippina with the Ashes of Germanicus, Pluto Carrying off Proserpina... are not a whit more natural, or less mad, than they used to be in former years, since he has forsaken nature, attempted... to embellish it... Why will he not stick to copying her majestical countenance, instead of daubing it with some absurd antics and fard of his own? Fancy pea-green skies, crimson-lake trees, and orange and purple grass; fancy cataracts, rainbows, suns, moons, and thunderbolts; shake them well up, with a quantity of gamboge, and you will have an idea of a fancy picture by Turner. ( Thackeray, Essays, Reviews, pp. 124-25)

CW