Abstract
J. M. W. Turner’s Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying — Typhon coming on, also known simply as The Slave Ship, was first shown in the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1840 (see Figure 13.1). It has since acquired one of the most extensive and colourful critical histories of any of Turner’s paintings.1 As was often his practice, Turner attached a verse-tag, which he wrote himself, to the painting’s entry in the exhibition catalogue. Along with the lengthy title, the verse-tag, to which I shall return below, made the painting’s relevance to the issues of the slave trade and abolition very clear. Exactly how the visual content of The Slave Ship relates to these issues, however, is much less certain. Indeed, since the middle of the last century, a number of scholars have sought specific sources and meanings for the painting’s rather enigmatic imagery. This research has produced a great deal of important information about Turner’s artistic practice and several very sophisticated interpretations, but still the precise nature of Turner’s comment on slavery and abolition remains a matter of debate.
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Notes
For sources before 1984 and a discussion of contemporary critical responses, see Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J. M. W. Turner, rev. edn, 2 vols (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), text volume, pp. 236–7. Other references not cited in this essay include Paul Gilroy, ‘Art of Darkness’, in Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Culture (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1993), pp. 74–85 (pp. 81–4), and Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 74 n. 79. On Mark Twain’s reaction to The Slave Ship see Jerrold Ziff, ‘What a Red Rag is to a Bull’, Turner Studies, 3, 2 (Winter 1984), 28.
This connection was first made by T. S. R. Boase, ‘Shipwrecks in English Romantic Painting’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 22, 3–4 (1959), 334–46 (pp. 341–2).
Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave-trade by Act ofParliament, 2nd edn (London: J. W. Parker, 1839), pp. 80–1.
John McCoubrey, ‘Turner’s Slave Ship: Abolition, Ruskin, and Reception’, Word & Image, 14, 4(October/December 1998), 319–53 (pp. 323–34).
Ibid., pp. 325–9.
Ibid., p. 322.
Ibid., p. 336.
Ibid., pp. 338–45.
Jan Marsh, ‘Ruskin and Turner’s Slavers Patriotic, Political and Pictorial Issues’, Visual Culture in Britain, 2, 1 (2001), 47–63 (p. 48).
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 50.
See, for instance, John Gage, J. M. W. Turner ‘A Wonderful Range of Mind’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Eric Shanes, Turner’s Human Landscape (London: Heinemann, 1989); Kathleen Nicholson, Turner’s Classical Landscape: Myth and Meaning (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Gerald Finley, Angel in the Sun: Turner’s Vision of History (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999).
The first scholar to connect Turner’s painting to these verses was Ann Livermore in ‘J. M. W. Turner’s Unknown Verse-Book’, The Connoisseur Year Book (1957), 78–86 (p. 80).
James Thomson, ‘Summer’, In The Complete Poetical Works ofJames Thomson, ed. J. Logie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908), pp. 1013–20.
Another example is Mary Robinson’s ‘The Negro Girl’ (1800), in Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period, ed. Peter Kitson et al. (London: Pickering and Chatto), IV, pp. 260–7. McCoubrey notes the importance of this motif and includes a number of other examples including Thomas Day’s A Dying Negro (London: W. Flexney, 1773). See McCoubrey, ‘Turner’s Slave Ship’, pp. 329–30.
Hugh Milligan, ‘The Lovers’, in Kitson and Lee, Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto), IV, p. 29.
A number of oil sketches, dated by Butlin and Joll to the mid 1830s, reveal Turner’s interest in observing and representing storms at sea. See Butlin and Joll, pp. 462, 463, 466.
John Ruskin, Modern Painters, 5 vols (New York: J. Wiley and Sons, 1878), IV, p. 336. Eric Shanes, in Turner’s Human Landscape, has discussed Turner’s use of effects of weather and light to complement the human significance of his landscapes (pp. 95–137).
Jack Lindsay, in J. M. W. Turner, His Life and Work: A Critical Biography (St Albans: Panther Books, 1973), comes the closest to my interpretation when he suggests that Turner’s painting recognizes ‘that the guilt of the slave trade was something too vast to be wiped out by any belated act of Parliament’ (p. 250). But Lindsay does not expand upon this observation.
David Brion Davis, The Emancipation Moment (Gettysburg, PA.: Gettysburg College, 1983), p. 8.
James Walvin, Black and White: The Negro and English Society, 1555–1945 (London: Allen Lane, 1973), p. 189.
Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Anti-Slavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (London: Macmillan, 1986).
Edward Royle and James Walvin, English Radicals and Reformers (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), pp. 32–5, and Drescher, pp. 67–88.
Ibid., p. 72.
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 2nd edn (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1757, facsimile reproduction, London: Scolar Press, 1970), pp. 129–30. These ideas are expressed in Burke’s texts in numerous other places; on vastness, see pp. 127–39 and 257–64.
Ibid., pp. 99–122.
For a comprehensive introduction to this aspect of Turner’s work see Andrew Wilton, Turner and the Sublime, exhibition catalogue (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).
Norman Bryson, ‘Enhancement and Displacement in Turner’, The Huntington Library Quarterly, 5, 49 (1986), 47–65.
Evelyn Joll, Martin Butlin, and Luke Hermann, eds, The Oxford Companion to J. M. W. Tamer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 104, 304.
Eric Shanes, Turner’s Rivers, Harbours and Coasts (London: Chatto and Windus, 1981), p. 5.
On the Temeraire, see Richard Stein, “Remember the Temeraire”: Turner’s Memorial of 1839’, Representations, 11 (1985), 165–200.
Leo Costello, ‘The Center Cannot Hold: The History Painting of J. M. W. Turner in the Age of Revolution’, unpub. PhD diss., Bryn Mawr College, 2003.
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Costello, L. (2004). Turner’s The Slave Ship (1840) : Towards a Dialectical History Painting. In: Carey, B., Ellis, M., Salih, S. (eds) Discourses of Slavery and Abolition. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522602_14
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