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In 1838 an old warship was towed up the Thames to be broken up for scrap. She was the Temeraire, which had fought at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, and now a small, sooty paddle-tug dragged her hulk toward the wrecking yard. Turner painted the moment with the pale ghost of the sailing ship glowing against a burning sunset while the black tug chuffs ahead of her, and the picture became a quiet farewell to the age of sail as steam took its place. He refused to sell it for the rest of his life.

Turner was a barber's son from Covent Garden who entered the Royal Academy schools at 14 and then spent 60 years chasing one thing above all, the behaviour of light in air. He travelled constantly with a sketchbook, watching storms, fires, and the new haze of industry, and pushed his late canvases until solid form nearly dissolved into glare and vapour.

He kept painting the changing world in front of him. In Rain, Steam and Speed of 1844 he sent a Great Western Railway train hurtling across a bridge through a downpour, among the first great pictures of the machine age. When he died in 1851 he left almost 300 finished paintings and tens of thousands of sketches and watercolours to the British nation, on the condition that they be kept together.