百戦の英雄

Turner built this picture on top of an old one. Decades earlier he had painted an industrial interior full of machinery, and around 1845 he brought it back out. That September a London foundry broke open the mould on Matthew Cotes Wyatt's huge bronze equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington, the general who had beaten Napoleon at Waterloo 30 years before. Turner took that event, the casting of a national hero in metal, and half-buried it in one of his storms of light. The dark shapes at the sides are the foundry and its workers. The glare in the centre reads as molten metal rather than any clear figure. He showed it at the Royal Academy in 1847, his only submission that year, giving a near-abstract blaze the title of a hero you can barely find in it.