"The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying: Typhoon Coming On)" by John Mallord William Turner

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.