The Slave Ship

[Eva Elisabeth]

For the first time since I saw the Lincoln movie I went to the movies yesterday to watch this movie (as I like his paintings):
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9yuanTQdAGc
Well, it was a bit long, Turner was portrayed as a quite unsavory person (I wonder if he was indeed), and his appearance didn't resemble his self-portrait:
   
...but still the movie was very interesting - and very "Victorian" (setting, costumes, etc.). One remarkable "aside" scene: Turner visited a daguerrotypist to have his first likeness taken- and sensed this new invention as the downfall of his art.

One main topic in the movie was one of his paintings: "The Slave Ship", originally entitled "Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhon coming on". I found it and it's "history" so fascinating that I think it's worth a post, also as it is on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (while most of Turner's works are kept and exhibited at the Tate Gallery in London).
   
J.M.W. Turner, The Slave Ship (1840). Oil on canvas. 90.8 × 122.6 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

A "Wiki summary":
"'The Slave Ship', originally entitled 'Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhon coming on' depicts a ship, visible in the background, sailing through a tumultuous sea of churning water and leaving scattered human bodies floating in its wake. Their dark skin and chained hands and feet indicate that they are slaves, thrown overboard from the ship. Looking even more carefully, one can see fish and sea monsters swimming in the water, possibly preparing to eat the slaves, and sea gulls circling overhead above the chaos.

J.M.W. Turner was inspired to paint "The Slave Ship" in 1840 after reading "The History and Abolition of the Slave Trade" by Thomas Clarkson. In 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong had ordered 133 slaves to be thrown overboard so that insurance payments could be collected. This event probably inspired Turner to create his landscape and to choose to coincide its exhibition with a meeting of the British Anti-Slavery Society. Although slavery had been outlawed in the British Empire since 1833, Turner and many other abolitionists believed that slavery should be outlawed around the world. Turner thus exhibited his painting during the anti-slavery conference, intending for Prince Albert, who was speaking at the event, to see it and be moved to increase British anti-slavery efforts. Placed next to the painting were lines from Turner's own untitled poem, written in 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?'

The painting might be viewed as an allegory against the exploitation of slaves and other human labour in favour of machines and economic advancement, represented by the coming storm engulfing the cruel captain, while the storm might remind of nature's dominance over man.

Mark Twain said, in A Tramp Abroad, Volume 1, Chapter XXIV: 'What a red rag is to a bull, Turner's 'Slave Ship' was to me, before I studied art. Mr. Ruskin is educated in art up to a point where that picture throws him into as mad an ecstasy of pleasure as it used to throw me into one of rage, last year, when I was ignorant. His cultivation enables him—and me, now—to see water in that glaring yellow mud, and natural effects in those lurid explosions of mixed smoke and flame, and crimson sunset glories; it reconciles him—and me, now—to the floating of iron cable-chains and other unfloatable things; it reconciles us to fishes swimming around on top of the mud—I mean the water. The most of the picture is a manifest impossibility—that is to say, a lie; and only rigid cultivation can enable a man to find truth in a lie. But it enabled Mr. Ruskin to do it, and it has enabled me to do it, and I am thankful for it. A Boston newspaper reporter went and took a look at the Slave Ship floundering about in that fierce conflagration of reds and yellows, and said it reminded him of a tortoise-shell cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes. In my then uneducated state, that went home to my non-cultivation, and I thought here is a man with an unobstructed eye. Mr. Ruskin would have said: This person is an @$$. That is what I would say, now.'

The art critic John Ruskin, who was the first owner of The Slave Ship [and one character in the movie and in the trailer], wrote, 'If I were reduced to rest Turner's immortality upon any single work, I should choose this.'"

Has anyone here seen this painting in Boston? (Would love to!)