Punk with a paintbrush: how Turner sunk the Empire

JMW Turner’s Battle of Trafalgar celebrates a great British victory 210 years ago today … but really it’s a mutiny, revealing a gigantic act of unpatriotic rebellion

The sea broils with war. Sails hover like veils above the dead and dying. Is this the Victory or defeat?

JMW Turner’s painting The Battle of Trafalgar 21 October 1805 is well worth looking at on Trafalgar Day, 210 years after Nelson’s stunning defeat of the French and Spanish fleets that changed the course of the Napoleonic wars and established a British naval supremacy that lasted into modern times.

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