Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On)
One of Turner's most celebrated works, "Slave Ship" is a striking example of the artist's fascination with violence, both human and elemental. He based the painting on an 18th-century poem that described a slave ship caught in a typhoon and on the true story of the Zong, a British ship whose captain, in 1781, had thrown overboard sick and dying enslaved people so that he could collect insurance money only available for those "lost at sea." Turner captures the horror of the event and the terrifying grandeur of nature through hot, churning color and light that merge sea and sky. The critic John Ruskin, the first owner of "Slave Ship," wrote, "If I were reduced to rest Turner's immortality upon any single work, I should choose this."
When Turner exhibited this picture at the Royal Academy in 1840, he paired it with the following extract from his unfinished and unpublished poem "Fallacies of Hope" (1812):
"Aloft all hands, strike the top-masts and belay;
Yon angry setting sun and fierce-edged clouds
Declare the Typhon's coming.
Before it sweeps your decks, throw overboard
The dead and dying - ne'er heed their chains
Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope!
Where is thy market now?"
For the full text of Turner's verse see A. J. Finberg, "The Life of J.M.W. Turner," R.A., 2nd ed., 1961, p. 474
NOTES:
[1] See Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, "The Paintings of J. M. W. Turner" (New Haven and London, 1984), text vol., pp. 236-237, cat. no. 385 and John Gage, ed., "Collected Correspondence of J. M. W. Turner" (Oxford, 1980), 282-283.
[2] See Madeleine Fidell Beaufort and Jeanne K. Welcher, "Some Views of Art Buying in New York in the 1870s and 1880s," Oxford Art Journal 5, no. 1 (1982): 51; and Nancy Scott, "America's first public Turner," British Art Journal 10, no. 3 (2010): 69-77.
[3] For further on Alice Sturgis Hooper, her brother-in-law, Thornton K. Lothrop, and his son, William, see Andrew Walker, "From Private Sermon to Public Masterpiece: J. M. W. Turner's The Slave Ship in Boston, 1876 - 1899," Journal of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 6 (1994): 4-13.
