During a recent trip that I made to London, I came across a wonderful painting by Turner at the National Gallery: "The Fighting Temeraire". This particular painting created a furor at the time, because the painter had taken the liberty, for aesthetic reasons, to alter the right order in which the tug's masts and smoke stack ought to go. We are told that the most telling detail in the picture of the ship is a vacant space. A jack-staff would formerly have been fixed to the top of the bowsprit cap; it is now missing. When in harbour, and she had been in harbour for 26 years, the "Temeraire" would have flown the red, white and blue union flag from her jack-staff. From the moment that she was sold out of the Navy, the "Temeraire" could no longer fly the flag. Where the union flag once flew, the tug's smoke now ascends. The full poignancy of the lines Turner adapted from Campbell can now be understood:

The flag which braved the battle and the breeze, No longer owns her.

The angle at which the tug's smoke is emitted is crucially important in making this point. It must belch out from a funnel sufficiently far forward and sufficiently tall for the smoke to be seen as fiery as it leaves the funnel, and seemingly still acrid as it pours backward over the bowsprit cap and through the "Temeraire's" masts. To achieve this effect, Turner ignores all contemporary steamer designs, and all his own first-hand observations of steamers, by placing the funnel foremost in the tug, in front of its mast. Turner's "mistake" in placing his tug's funnel before its mast is evidently deliberate: R.C. Leslie perceived it to be Turner's 'first, strong, almost prophetic idea of smoke, soot, iron and steam, coming to the front in all naval matters'.

To Turner's annoyance, the positions of the tug's funnel and its mast were to be "corrected" by J.T. Willmore in his engraving of 1845. Arguments over Turner's alleged "mistakes" over the position of the tug's mast and the direction of his sunset were revived nearly forty years after the exhibition of his painting, and have hardly ceased.

In the finished engraving, Willmore "clarified" many details which Turner had deliberately left indistinct. R.C. Leslie told Ruskin thirty years later that 'the rigging of the ship in this engraving was trimmed up and generally made intelligible to the engraver by some mechanical marine artist or other... the rigging is certainly not as Turner painted it. As well as extra rigging".

Willmore added a crow's nest, extra gun-ports and, for good measure, cables running out of the "Temeraire's" hawseholes. No cables by which the tug could tow the "Temeraire" are visible in Turner's picture. But Willmore's boldest alteration was to transpose the tug's funnel and its mast. This "correction" appears to have been done without Turner's knowledge. Other changes show how the poetry of his painting is diminished by the engraver's determination to define details which Turner had chosen to leave indistinct.

What is so astonishing is to see in today's digital world, some of the same debates being brought up and with the same sense of self-righteous outcry for what is considered to be the none-altered version of a picture.