The Slave Ship
J. M. W. Turner·1840
Historical Context
Turner exhibited The Slave Ship at the Royal Academy in 1840 with the extended title Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying — Typhon coming on. The painting was inspired by the 1781 Zong massacre, where slave traders threw enslaved Africans overboard to claim insurance on the "lost cargo." Turner may have been prompted by Thomas Clarkson's updated History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, published in 1839. The churning crimson sea, scattered with chains and drowning figures, represents Turner's most politically charged work. John Ruskin, who owned the painting for many years, called it the noblest sea painting ever executed. Now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, it remains one of the most powerful indictments of slavery in art history.
Technical Analysis
Turner's apocalyptic sunset blazes with fiery reds, oranges, and gold, with the churning sea rendered in thick, turbulent impasto. The bodies and chains in the foreground water are deliberately rendered as near-abstract forms, forcing the viewer to confront the horror through Turner's overwhelming atmospheric power.
Look Closer
- ◆Notice the crimson sea: Turner uses saturated red rather than conventional blue-green for the ocean, transforming the sea itself into a visual equivalent of the horror it contains.
- ◆Look at the chains and figures in the foreground water: deliberately rendered as near-abstract forms in the churning red surf, these are the drowning enslaved people whose murder the painting commemorates.
- ◆Observe the blazing sunset above: the apocalyptic sky of reds and golds makes the entire atmosphere incandescent, as if nature itself registers the moral horror occurring beneath it.
- ◆Find the slave ship itself: barely visible through the storm as a dark shape in the distance, the ship's obscuring presence makes the human crime and nature's overwhelming response the painting's twin subjects.
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