The slave ship
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| The slave ship |
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| William Turner , 1840 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 90.8 x 122.6 cm |
| Museum of Fine Arts , Boston |
The Slave Ship (German: Das Sklavenschiff ), original title Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying - Typhon coming on ( slave traders throw the dead and dying overboard - a typhoon draws in ), is a painting by the romantic English painter William Turner from 1840 It shows a sailing ship before an approaching storm, from which dying and dead slaves are thrown overboard. Today the picture hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston .
Image content and provenance
Turner's work is carried out in the technique of oil on canvas and is 91 × 123 cm in landscape format. The picture is a maritime painting, a so-called seascape . In the background of the composition it shows a sunset with a dramatic cloud formation, which heralds a growing storm. To the left of it, a three-masted sailing ship is drifting in a troubled sea, probably a schooner with only one staysail in place. It's a slave ship that got caught in a storm and is now trying to get out of the situation. The crew has already thrown dead and dying people who are still handcuffed overboard. In the foreground of the painting you can see human bodies floating in the water, to which various marine animals, sometimes in fanciful representations, and birds come to eat the bodies. The black ankle cuffs of the corpses floating on the surface are clearly visible. At the right edge of the picture two monstrously large beings, definitely to be understood as sea monsters , swim up to them.
The center of the picture is the setting sun, framed by the wisps of cloud, which at the same time acts as a light source for the dramatic lighting. The limbs of the bodies floating in the water point to the ship from the foreground of the picture. In order to draw the viewer's attention to the slaves floating in the water, Turner has depicted their ankle shackles, called chains in the literature , with a particularly high contrast. A horizon line that separates the ocean from the sky is not clearly visible. The line blurs because the sky and sea are full of movement. The colors red, orange and yellow in this picture illustrate the suffering and are almost reminiscent of a fire. While Turner applied them to the center of the picture in a saturated and luminous way with strong brushstrokes, they appear rather dull in the corners of the picture surface; also in this way the gaze should be directed to the center of the picture to the ship and the sun.
The color of the picture extends from a pure white to an otherwise dominant cinnabar , with an emerald green and purple , which the artist has applied in an impasto-like manner and partly with a painting knife (from the description of the picture by William Makepeace Thackeray from 1840).
Provenance : Turner handed the work over to the dealer Thomas Griffith, who sold it to John James Ruskin in London in December 1843 . On April 15, 1869, it was offered at " Christie's " but was not sold there. In 1872 it was acquired by John Taylor Johnston in New York, who in December 1876 sold the painting to Alice Sturgis Hooper in Boston through the American Art Association. It passed into the possession of her nephew William Sturgis Hooper Lothrop and was finally sold by him to the Museum of Fine Arts on February 24, 1899 for US $ 65,000 (today approx. US $ 2,060,000).
Historical background
Turner's painting is based on an actual event from 1781, when, on the instructions of Captain Collingwood, 133 slaves were thrown overboard on the British slave ship “Zong” in order to obtain money (around £ 30 per slave) from the insurance company for the “loss of goods” Paint lake. With this painting, Turner criticized an attitude towards slavery that was widespread in the English Empire at the time.
Turner exhibited The Slave Ship at London's Royal Academy in 1840 with an excerpt from his unfinished poem Fallacies of Hope . It says:
| Original text excerpt | Free translation |
|---|---|
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“Aloft all hands, strike the top-masts and belay; |
“Raise your hands, cut the masts and secure them; |
Reviews and interpretation
Already in the first exhibition of the picture in 1840 at the Royal Academy of Arts , on the occasion of a congress against slavery, it received a lot of attention. Both the writer, painter and social philosopher John Ruskin, who owned the picture for a while, as well as the poet William Makepeace Thackeray recognized the revolutionary and ecstatic element in Turner's painting style, which in this picture, with its unique coloring, experiences the highest perfection.
Ruskin praised the (for that time) close observation of nature and described the work as Turner's most important seascape . For him: “If I were reduced to rest Turner's immortality upon any single work, I should choose this” (“If I had to fix Turner's immortality to one single work, I would choose this one.”). He admired the intensive capture of the essential, and sees in it an artistic archetype of the sea. For him, the dominant color red is a symbol of blood, but not only of life, but also of destruction.
Thackeray describes the painting technique - the application of the colors with a painting knife , the use of the colors and their meaning. For him, the act of creation, not the reproduction of nature observation, is the focus. In Turner's choice of colors, he sees the demonic and evil of the destructive force of nature. The colors in Turner's works of that second creative period are something completely new in painting. It was not until the end of the 19th century, with the French symbolists , that painting emerged again in which "the intellectual expressive value of the colors takes precedence over the sensual appeal of the impression."
More recent interpretations from the 20th century see this ship in the storm as a reference to the biblical Noah's Ark or to the ship of life as an allegory of human life. It can therefore be compared with Théodore Géricault's painting Raft of the Medusa , the painting Die Dante Barque by Eugène Delacroix, or Caspar David Friedrich's painting Das Eismeer . Even Arthur Rimbaud's poetic poetry Le Bateau ivre ( The Drunken Boat ) fits into this series with the symbolism of the shipwreck in the 19th century. Turner has painted many pictures of the sea, but this one takes, according to the art historian Henning Bock , who also asks the speculative question: A political commitment? , a special position: “It has a special status that it shares only with a few other works of the time. Here Turner found a topic that suited his pessimistic worldview and yet became a symbol of the world in the language of art. "
Exhibitions (selection)
- Royal Academy of Arts , London, 1840
- JMW Turner, the painter of light. New National Gallery in Berlin, September 15 to November 6, 1972
literature
- Abigail Ward: “Words are all I have left of my eyes”: Blinded by the Past in JMW Turner's Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying and David Dabydeen's “Turner”. In: The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. 42, No. 1, 2007, pp. 47-58.
- John W. McCoubrey: Turner's Slave Ship . Abolition, Ruskin, and reception. 1998, ISSN 0266-6286 , p. 319-353 , doi : 10.1080 / 02666286.1998.10443961 .
- Stephen J. May: Voyage of The Slave Ship . JMW Turner's masterpiece in historical context. McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, Jefferson, North Carolina 2014, ISBN 978-0-7864-7989-4 .
Web links
- Website of the Museum of Fine Arts: Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) on mfa.org
- Humanities 102 on bu.digication.com
Individual evidence
- ↑ Artwork details on tate.org.uk
- ↑ Chase Gorland: Humanities 102 , image description on a Boston University website. Retrieved November 19, 2016.
- ↑ Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) on mfa.org
- ↑ Case Study: The Trial of the Zong Slave Ship ( Memento of the original from September 16, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on twmuseums.org.uk (PDF)
- ↑ Part II. On bu.digication.com
- ↑ Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying - Typhoon Coming On) on 19thcenturyart-facos.com
- ^ John Ruskin, Edward T. Cook: The complete works of John Ruskin . tape 3 : Modern Painters. . Allen [u. a.], London 1903, OCLC 878454359 , pp. 572 ( online ).
- ^ Robert L. Herbert: The Art Criticism of John Ruskin. New York 1964, p. 368 ff.
- ↑ Henning Bock, Ursula Prinz: JMW Turner: paintings, watercolors . Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin 1972, OCLC 30117307 , p. 49 (exhibition catalog).
- ^ Henning Bock in the catalog: JMW Turner: Paintings, watercolors. Chapter The Navy Pictures. P. 37 ff.
- ↑ Eduard Hüttinger : The shipwreck - On the interpretation of a picture motif in the 19th century. In: Contributions to motivational studies of the 19th century. Munich 1970, p. 21 ff.
- ↑ quoted from Henning Bock in the catalog: JMW Turner: Paintings, Aquarelle. Chapter The Navy Pictures. P. 50.
