I'm pleased too. Some years ago I travelled to London with the express intention of seeing the painting.

Bob

'Realism' i.e. looking like the real thing, was never JMW Turner's driving force, which is why he and Constable never hit it off. He is best described as a romanticist landscape painter and his work prefaced the style of painting known as impressionist – a word which speaks for itself. If you approach The Fighting Temeraire simply as a picture of a steam tug pulling a decrepit hulk through a fog then it's not very attractive or realistic, but if you look at it as a representation of the silent passing of the age of sail then it's haunting, sad, magnificent and any number of other such words.

I held pretty much the same sort of opinion as you about paintings until I came face to face with a real Leonardo – in this case a small Madonna and Child in the Hermitage Museum. I was utterly transfixed, and I'm still not sure why. You could criticise many of the so-called great masters for being unrealistic but the galleries still pack 'em in. You can't fool all of the people all of the time – although I do wonder sometimes about Salvador Dali!

Dave M

Edited By Dave Milbourn on 09/05/2016 10:32:12

Edited By Dave Milbourn on 09/05/2016 10:32:33

I seem to be of the same opinion as Dave M, apart from the fact that when Temeraire was scrapped in 1838, it certainly did not indicate the passing of sail because in Britain, as they were still building sailing ships for a further 70 years, although the final boom of sailing ship construction in the UK was the entire decade of the 1890s!

To me, the proportions of the ship look all wrong and it is almost "blurred!" It looks like an onion with shorts masts! I think it was Turner (may be wrong) that painted a picture of a steam locomative that looked (to me) rather like a bottle on wheels

Agree that Leonardo da Vinci was a "real" master painter. As for Van Gogh, I enjoyed the film (on TV a few weeks ago) but find his paintings far too "gaudy!"

Not much hope for me then, as I do attempt to get as close a resemblance to the original as possible on a small scale, but would not like to be compared with Turner

Bob

Here's a link to the National Gallery's website page **LINK**

Be careful! Websites like this can lose you an afternoon!

Dave M

Yes, Geoff Hunt and Robert Lloyd are both excellent painters. But as for the Jack Aubrey books, again I am one of the few who find them boring in the extreme! At present reading Caribbee by Julian Stockwin, one of the better naval fiction writers (Napoleonic era).

Bob

I remember one idyllic summer's evening, sitting outside The Plough at Wysall with a bunch of friends from school, slurping Burton's finest and talking our usual rubbish. Some pretentious types at the next table began a very loud conversation about art and artists – dropping names like confetti and "how so-and-so managed to convey the essence of the subject while such-and-such often missed it" ……blah blah ad nauseam. My friend Trevor was clearly becoming a little irritated by this twaddle, so he leaned foward and said to no-one in particular "Well I'm personally blown away by the work of C Reginald Dalby. I'm surprised none of you have mentioned him. Surely he must be up there with the classic painters of this country like Constable and Turner?"

"I'm ashamed to say that his work has somehow escaped my attention" said one twittering little girl. "What style best describes his work?"

"Portraits" said Trevor, pausing with magnificent comic timing before adding "He paints faces……..on trains"

**LINK**

We fell about laughing. Happy days!

DM

When I travelled to see the Temeraire I already knew the painting was 'wrong'. If I remember correctly some of the faults are that the chimney and mast on the tug are the wrong way around, the Temeraire wouldn't have had masts, let alone sails, and the sun couldn't have been where it is on the picture. However, I had spent some years reading about the greats of the British Navy of the 18th and 19th centuries and this was one of those pictures that, against that background, made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I don't care if it's right, it's the sense of connection that it conveys that was important to me.

I can't believe that Bob, of all the modellers comments I read, can't identify with the feeling, if not the painting. It's certainly one of the 'British' paintings I would urge the SNP to grab if we become independent! Do you want me to list some others? In this country we have been blessed with fabulous maritime artists.

Daev,

I am in total agreement with you on that. I do prefer a photograph to a painting any day! But some things cannot be captured on a camera, so a painting has to do! I did try my hand at painting years ago, but, as you say, it is messy, and I was never very good at it! I occasionally make diorama models where I try to capture the "essence" of the scene, but most of my work shows pristine models of the ships as they came out of the builders yard. Here is a River Thames scene with a rusty collier with a sailing barge and coal barge alongside.

We all have different tastes and I have always been in a minority with mine, not liking warships, ferries, Jack Aubrey, modern paintings, Turner, Monet, Van Gogh, Victory, Cutty Sark, galleons, modern cruise ships to name a few! The HMS Warrior is great!)

Bob

Edited By Bob Wilson on 10/05/2016 17:56:08

Colin,

You are quite right about it not being The HMS Warrior. I was initially going to just say the Warrior, and after putting "the" in, changed my mind to putting HMS Warior in brackets, but made a hash of it forgot to remove "the" and missed out the left hand bracket. Later, when I noticed, and came to edit it, the edit facility had timed out, but I am surprised anyone noticed!

I never knew the engines were GRP, they looked real enough, but I don't mind plastic, in fact I use a lot of it!

Bob

My father was an artist, with whom I had many interesting discussion about art. His very firmly held view was that what constitues a good painting in and of itself has very little, if anything at all, to do with such things as subject matter, degree of realism or amount of detail.

All these are of course matters that are likely to evoke reaction and emotion, and as such he found them worthy of consideration and opinion, but they were still to him very much secondary issues. What really mattered for him was how well form and colour worked within the confines of the (essentially two-dimensional) surface as delimited by a paintings outer edges.

For my part, I clearly did not inherit his capacity for reading form, and so I have never been able to really see what he obviously saw; one (and possibly two) of my brothers did, and from many years of discussions with my father and brothers, I have come to the conclusion that their's was and is a minority view for the simple reason that such levels of sensitivity to form is a relatively rare commodity.

Of course, none of the above has ever stopped me from enjoying the art I happen to like in my way: if I like something, that is enough for me, and I have never felt any particular need to have my personal judgements of taste justified by anybody else, nor do I really care to sit in judgment on other people's tastes or preference — as the old maxim goes, de gustibus non est dispuntandum …

/Mattias