Turner’s “The Slave Ship” Is More Than a Disturbance at Sea

This story was first published in Coronadiet’s old site on June 30, 2020.

Linear perspective was the dominant visual paradigm prior to the nineteenth century. The model is singular and consistent in order to ground viewers in the same visual stability as they would experience while standing on a pier overlooking the ocean. The horizon line was relied on as a center point in travel and navigation, used for establishing location and direction. After the turn of the century, artists began to produce works that disrupted this comfortable standard. English Romantic painter J. M. W. Turner’s The Slave Ship is an exemplary example depicting the common practice where slave ship captains threw dying or ill slaves overboard to receive insurance that only covered slaves lost at sea.

The painting’s horizon line is skewed, tucked behind tumultuous waves that position the viewer into a displaced worldview where slavery and colonialism had become the norm, much like the fall of linear perspective. Turner’s most known and impactful landscapes are often characterized by this natural violence, with expressive colors and brush strokes surrendering themselves to constructed yet realistic turbulence. Viewing Turner’s paintings during the current period of crises offers disturbing corroboration of problematic global practices. At the same time, it comes with an odd sense of relief — comfort in knowing that since centuries ago, art has synthesized, transmitted, and disseminated universal messages and truths in a sort of visual code. Once deciphered, its intricacies open up a universe that, amusingly, orients viewers by disorienting them.