With “The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805” (1822–24), Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) created his only royal commission – a painting widely regarded as the largest, most ambitious, and most contested work of his career. This bachelor’s thesis examines what makes Turner’s approach to the subject so distinctive. Rather than capturing a single moment, Turner compresses several temporally separate episodes of the naval battle into one layered composition. In place of the heroised Admiral Nelson, an anonymous sailor occupies the foreground; elements drawn from the tradition of history painting merge with marine and landscape imagery, dissolving the boundaries of time, genre, and space. Comparison with Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg’s pendant “The Battle of the First of June, 1794” and the naval battle scenes of Nicholas Pocock reveals how far Turner departs from the conventions of his contemporaries. His painting is not a documentary record but a symbolically charged total view of the battle – a lieu de mémoire that renders visible the significance of Trafalgar for the British nation and the emerging sense of national identity in the nineteenth century.
