Turner sets out to paint the smoke of war more hauntingly than his rival Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, a stage painter who turned his hand to battle scenes. In fact, Turner’s Trafalgar was commissioned as a pendant to de Loutherbourg’s The Battle of the First of June, 1794.
Both paintings show the suffering of a sea battle amid the smoke. It is Turner’s troubling vision of war that clings at your mind.