THE SLAVE SHIP

The Slave Ship by Joseph Mallord W. Turner

The Slave Ship by Joseph Mallord W. Turner

Introduction

Joseph Mallord William Turner was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolorist and printmaker. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivaling history painting. Although renowned for his oil paintings, Turner is also one of the greatest masters of British watercolor landscape painting. He is commonly known as "the painter of light" and his work is regarded as a Romantic preface to Impressionism.

In 1785, as a result of a "fit of illness" in the family the young Turner was sent to stay with his maternal uncle, Joseph Mallord William Marshall, in Brentford, which was then a small town west of London on the banks of the River Thames. From this period, the earliest known artistic exercise by Turner is found, a series of simple colourings of engraved plates from Henry Boswell's Picturesque View of the Antiquities of England and Wales. Around 1786, Turner was sent to Margate on the north-east Kent coast. Here Turner produced a series of early drawings of the town and surrounding area foreshadowing his later work. Turner would return to Margate many times in later life. By this time, Turner's drawings were already being exhibited in his father's shop window and sold for a few shillings each. His father boasted to the artist Thomas Stothard that: "My son, sir, is going to be a painter". In 1789 Turner again stayed with his uncle, who by this time had retired to Sunningwell in Oxford. A whole sketchbook of work from his time in Oxford survives, as well as an early watercolour of Oxford. The use of pencil sketches on location as a basis for later finished paintings would form the basis of Turner's essential working style for his whole career.

Thesis Statement

It is about the description, interpration of Slave Ship painting by Joseph Mallord W. Turner.

The Slave Ship

J. M. W. Turner was inspired to paint “The Slave Ship” in 1840 after reading a book, “The History and Abolition of the Slave Trade,” written by Thomas Clarkson in 1808 and reprinted in 1839 (Walker, 1994). In 1783, the setting of the book, slaving companies reimbursed sea captains for slaves lost at sea, but not for those who died onboard, believing that the captains shouldn't be compensated for their maltreatment of the slaves. The book depicted a captain, confronted with the problem of a ship full of sick slaves and an oncoming typhoon, choosing to throw the slaves overboard so that he could claim the insurance for drowning (Martin, 2012).

While the impact of the painting can't be accurately measured, it likely contributed to the passing of an 1843 law in which the British Empire pledged to more effectively suppress slavery and the slave trade. Once that law had been passed, a cascade of anti-slavery laws from many other Atlantic countries were passed, dramatically decreasing the amount of ...