British Painting

  • The Fighting Temeraire

    ByDominik Szobak

    This ship could not have looked like this. Before the Temeraire was sold for breaking, everything had been stripped from her: masts, rigging, guns, even part of the planking. What went up the Thames was a bare hull. Turner gave her masts back — and set her sailing towards the sunset, though in reality she…

  • The Hay Wain

    ByDominik Szobak

    England did not want this painting. Shown at the Royal Academy in 1821, it failed to find a buyer and sat in the studio for three years. It took the Paris Salon of 1824 to change that — a gold medal from Charles X, and a generation of French painters who took what they saw…