The Successes and Setbacks of Turner’s “The Slave Ship” as an Abolitionist Work of Art
Amidst a 1781 storm at sea, the Zong, a British slave ship, threw hundreds of enslaved individuals overboard to collect insurance money for lost cargo. Public outrage over the court case of this incident remembered as the Zong massacre would fuel abolitionist sentiment in Britain in the following decades into the 19th century. During these same decades, painters in Romanticist art movement took to the sublime they found in nature as a way to embrace emotion. The collision of this growing abolitionist movement with the proliferation of Romanticist art in the nineteenth century can best be seen in a work like J. M. W. Turner’s “The Slave Ship,” exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1840, only a month before the World Anti-Slavery Convention’s first meeting in London. Despite its modest size, Turner’s depiction of the Zong massacre is engrossing, with its fiery sunset sky glowing over the ghastly carnage in the waves below. Only the chained hands and feet of the enslaved victims being eaten alive are visible in the bloody waters.
As a romanticist artist, Turner pioneered the use of abstracted color to bring greater emotional force and motion to landscapes. Though his scenes usually depict dramatic subject matter, they are often remembered for their awe-inspiring aesthetic quality. So exceedingly does the beauty of his work dwarf its subject matter that when I went to see Turner’s “The Slave Ship” at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, I heard a visitor remark “it’s so pretty!” before drifting on and completely missing the central, horrifying story of the painting. Unfortunately, rather than engaging the viewer with an abolitionist message and provoking any kind of meaningful thought about how inhumane the slave trade was, “The Slave Ship” merely stuns its viewer into thoughtlessly admiring its beauty from afar.
The painting’s aesthetic value is a double-edged sword. While it may cause some to completely miss its abolitionist message, it also draws viewers closer toward it to deliver its sobering, emotional punch; it’s harrowing to approach what appears to be a depiction of a sunset and instead be confronted with a scene of abandoned slaves being swallowed by the merciless sea. This shock was necessary to stir up support for abolition. The painting is as aesthetically pleasing from afar, when one does not face its sanguine horror too closely, as the Atlantic slave trade was morally swallowable, when one did not face its inhumanity too closely. But upon closer inspection of both, the truth is unmistakable. Therein lies the power of this painting; unlike other abolitionist appeals, from pamphlets to anti-slavery conventions, which declare their abolitionist intent plainly, Turner’s “The Slave Ship” slips both a grim story and a staunch abolitionist message into a work that initially appears approachable and even visually appealing.
The visual composition of “The Slave Ship” compounds its power; the bright, central ray of the sun initially draws our eyes to the distant radiant sky, but when we look below, we find the colors much deeper and the subject matter much darker. The swirls of color that give the sunset and raging storm clouds their divine glow form horrifying streaks of blood in the water below. With the saturation of its colors fiercest at its center, the painting seizes our eye and refuses to let us look away from its scene, and, by extension, slavery itself. As Tobias Döring, author of “Turning the Colonial Gaze,” put it, Turner’s painting “derives its power and effect through the visual rhetoric of the sublime” (Döring). Thus, the aesthetic value and power of “The Slave Ship” as an argument for abolition are not separate; it is necessary for it to be aesthetically stunning for it to be powerful. Indeed, the painting’s beauty does not “distract from the subject matter,” but rather, to Mark Frost, author of “The Guilty Ship,” serves as a “means to articulate it” (Frost). Only in nature’s unparalleled sublime does Turner find the raw emotional potency appropriate to passionately argue against slavery. What better means for a Romantic-era painter to articulate rage toward slavery than with the visual fury of a tempestuous seascape?
But it is not merely visual or emotional power that makes “The Slave Ship” such a moving abolitionist work of art; it is also the painting’s moral argument. As anyone who is drawn closer by the beauty of “The Slave Ship” will discover, the very elements that make the painting aesthetically pleasing from afar stand as symbols for a powerful moral message. The ship itself drifts away from the vividly colored center of the painting to the drab far edge as its crew meets its deserved fate in the storm unleashed by a godly figure, depicted in the furor of the burning sun. It thus becomes clear why the art critic John Ruskin considered “The Slave Ship” Turner’s single greatest achievement, for he wrote in his Modern Painters I that the greatest art “conveys to the mind of the spectator, by any means whatsoever, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.” By conveying to his spectators so effectively the “great idea” of abolishing slavery, Turner has, in Ruskin’s eyes, produced great art. As Mark Frost explains, “Ruskin saw the optical effects of the painting as articulating moral symbolism.” Its aesthetic is what drove its moral power. When it was first exhibited in Victorian-era England, it was with this power that the painting confronted its viewers with the pressing political issue of abolition.
However, in centering aesthetic value in his portrait of slavery, Turner relinquishes specificity. Does the painting’s lack of detail, which would identify it as a specific depiction of the Zong massacre, diminish its power? Without either the painting itself or the title explicitly referring to the massacre, it facilitates its audience’s mere glossing over the painting’s core historical meaning, reaching a narrower audience than its abolitionist message would have benefited from. Viewers may gawk in horror at the gore but, without specifically reading the blurb about the painting, never realize it concerns slavery.
It can be argued that such a lack of specificity also turns Turner’s masterpiece into a universal argument for abolition; nevermind the details of such and such specific slave ship’s incident because the painting’s kernel rests upon the cruelty of the establishment of slavery as a whole. The details of the incident are thus rendered trivial within the scope of the greater movement against slavery. This, however, is problematic when one considers that in the same work that blurs the focus on the identity of the guilty ship, the enslaved victims, too, find their individual identities blurred into a mass of faceless, chained arms and feet reaching out from the bloody waters. They are reduced to props for Turner’s greater aesthetic objective, precisely enabling the dehumanization that the painting seeks to condemn.
David Dabydeen lambastes this dehumanization in the limelight in his poem Turner, a rather scathing depiction of Turner as a pedophilic ship captain who derived sadist pleasure from a scene of dying slaves (Frost). While commendably brave in its critique of Turner, who is a much beloved English icon, such a severe critique of the painter for supposedly deriving pleasure from painting human suffering is unfair. While lacking precise detail in his visual argument against slavery, Turner’s abolitionist intent in “The Slave Ship” cannot be discounted, especially when one considers a poem he wrote titled The Fallacies of Hope. In a passage about a typhoon that is widely interpreted as setting the scene for “The Slave Ship,” he describes the oncoming storm that is to hand the slave ship its deserved end, exclaiming “Hope, Hope, fallacious hope! / Where is thy market now?” (Finberg). To Mark Frost, this line’s “attack on slavery” as a horrible facet of unbridled commerce is “clear.” Thus, while Dabydeen’s Turner makes for a poetically gripping and eye-catching piece of criticism of Turner, it is unjust to attack him personally for whatever kind of “sadism” he would have supposedly derived from painting this carnage when one considers the abolitionist sentiment he clearly voiced in his own poetry.
Indeed, the stark duality of the painting’s sublimity and horror unearths a broader ethical dilemma–whether it is even moral to depict human suffering in the aesthetically pleasing context of art. In some ways, the painting’s aesthetic poignancy takes away as much as it gives. Making art out of something as inhumane as throwing slaves overboard for insurance money can be seen as defeating the very abolitionist, humane intent of the work. It is likely that the Boston MFA visitor I encountered who only noticed the painting’s beauty is one of many who completely missed the work’s central meaning, and they would not necessarily be to blame because Turner has diluted the horror that we ought to feel in the face of human suffering by creating such a beautiful scene out of it.
Thus, art, while an immensely effective channel through which political movements like the abolitionist movement could gain support, can be problematic when it creates beauty and thus aesthetic viewing pleasure from human suffering. It becomes even more ethically questionable considering that Turner’s own career benefited from painting “The Slave Ship,” both through the sale of the painting and the crucial exposure it brought to Turner as an artist in exhibits all over the world. Though effective as an argument against slavery, Turner’s “The Slave Ship” still embodies the ethical dilemma of using art to depict human suffering because of art’s inherent ability to create aesthetic pleasure.
Works Cited
Döring, Tobias. “Turning the Colonial Gaze”, Third Text, 38 (1997), 3–14, 10.
Finberg, A. J. The Life of J. M. W Turner, R, A., 2nd ed., 1961, p. 474.
Frost, Mark (2010). “‘The Guilty Ship’: Ruskin, Turner and Dabydeen.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, no. 3: 376.
Ruskin, John. Modern Painters I, London: Smith, Elder and Company, 1843.
Note: Originally written in Spring 2023 as part of the Aesthetics Intro Writing course at USC.
