The painting, The Slave Ship was created by Turner late in his career as a
protest against inhumanity. As a painter of the Romantic Movement, Turner decided
to highlight a horrifying and tragic contemporary event when he painted The Slave Ship. Turner was inspired to
paint The Slave Ship after reading
the poem “Fallacies of Hope” and learning about an actual British slave ship,
Zong, whose captain threw his sick and dying slaves overboard in order to receive
insurance money. The captain’s insurance did not cover slaves lost to disease,
but it did cover slaves “lost at sea”. The Zong tragedy occurred in 1781, but
similar events were still occurring during the 1840’s when Turner painted The Slave Ship. Turner saw such events
as horrific, and painted a scene to match his feelings. He wanted to make the
public aware of a specific tragic episode, so that they would protest such
massacres and help prevent them from ever happening again. The Slave Ship contains
beautiful colors which intermingle creating a gorgeous aesthetic, but the undercurrent
of horror reveals itself as soon as the viewer sees the arms and sharks in the
lower right of the painting. John Ruskin, an art critic of the time, bought the
painting and praised The Slave Ship
for being “the true, the beautiful, and the intellectual”. I watched the movie Mr. Turner and it depicts Ruskin’s
enthusiasm for The Slave Ship. In the
film, Ruskin appears to be the only person who appreciates Turner’s later
works, which is interesting because Turner’s later works are the ones that greatly
influence future artists. In his later works, Turner focuses on the effects of
light and the fact that light determines how we see things. Turner’s later
works form a critical transition step from the paintings of old to modern art,
because in his later works, Turner focuses more on exploring the effects of color
and light and less on creating perfect forms.
This notion of an artwork depicting how light affects people’s vision
was a precursor to the ideas and work of the impressionists, who fully exploited
the effects of light in their paintings. The
Slave Ship hangs in The Museum of Fine Art in Boston. The next time you
visit Boston be sure to see this masterpiece in person.
