Focus on The Fighting Temeraire and analyze the Artistic licence.
Turner took a degree of artistic licence with the painting.  The ship was known to her crew as "Saucy", rather than "Fighting" Temeraire. Before being sold to the ship-breaker John Beatson, the ship had been lying at Sheerness Dockyard, and was then moved to his wharf at Rotherhithe, then in Surrey but now in Southwark.  As shown in a "prosaic drawing, made on the spot by a trained observer" (William Beatson, the ship-breaker's brother) and turned into a lithograph, her masts and rigging were removed before her sale and journey to the breaker's yard. All of her cannon, anchors and assorted hardware had been removed and salvaged for the navy to use as spare parts. She was towed by two tugboats, not just one, and in the other direction (the sun sets in the west, while the Thames estuary is at the river's eastern end). One of the tugboats, that depicted in the painting, was John Rogers Watkins' Monarch.
Thames Sheerness Dockyard Southwark lithograph mast Surrey John Rogers Watkins' Rotherhithe wharf estuary tugboat William Beatson