Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss The Fighting Temeraire, JMW Turner's painting of a famous ship from the Battle of Trafalgar on its way to a breakers' yard on the Thames.

This image: Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Fighting Temeraire, 1839 (c) The National Gallery, London

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss "The Fighting Temeraire", one of Turner's greatest works and the one he called his 'darling'. It shows one of the most famous ships of the age, a hero of Trafalgar, being towed up the Thames to the breakers' yard, sail giving way to steam. Turner displayed this masterpiece to a public which, at the time, was deep in celebration of the Temeraire era, with work on Nelson's Column underway, and it was an immediate success, with Thackeray calling the painting 'a national ode'.

With

Susan Foister

Curator of Early Netherlandish, German and British Painting at the National Gallery

David Blayney Brown

Manton Curator of British Art 1790-1850 at Tate Britain

and

James Davey

Curator of Naval History at the National Maritime Museum

Producer: Simon Tillotson.