Detail of Slave Ship by Turner in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, January 2018

Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On)

Joseph Mallord William Turner (English, 1775–1851)

1840

Medium/Technique: Oil on canvas

Dimensions 90.8 x 122.6 cm (35 3/4 x 48 1/4 in.)

Credit Line Henry Lillie Pierce Fund

Accession Number: 99.22

Collections: Europe

Classifications: Paintings

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exhibited this picture at the Royal Academy in 1840, he paired it with the following extract from his unfinished and unpublished poem "Fallacies of Hope" (1812):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
ProvenanceConsigned by the artist to his dealer, Thomas Griffith (b. 1795); December, 1843, sold by Griffith to John James Ruskin (b. 1785 - d. 1864), London, for his son, John Ruskin (b. 1819 - d. 1900) [see note 1]; April 15, 1869, Ruskin sale, Christie's, London, lot 50, unsold; 1872, sold by Ruskin, through William T. Blodgett (b. about 1832 - d. 1875), New York, to John Taylor Johnston (b. 1820 - d. 1893), New York [see note 2]; December 19-22, 1876, Johnston sale, American Art Association, New York, lot 76, to Alice Sturgis Hooper (b. 1841 - d. 1879), Boston [see note 3]; by descent to her nephew, William Sturgis Hooper Lothrop, Boston; 1899, sold by William Lothrop to the MFA for $65,000. (Accession Date: February 24, 1899)


Text from: collections.mfa.org/objects/31102/slave-ship-slavers-throwing-overboard-the-dead-and-dying-t