Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon coming on!

J.M.W. Turner, The Slave Ship (1840). Oil on canvas. 90.8 × 122.6 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon coming on” or simply “The slave ship”, for me is one of the greatest masterpieces of the all time. Made by British painter Joshep Mallord William Turner, was exhibited the first time on 1840.

This is a Romanticism picture, made in the last years of this style. In these times, the first appearances of the Impressionism begin to see in the new painters and something about that style we can see in this picture. The colors and the oils were applied in another way compared with others Romanticism painters like Eugène Delacroix or Théodore Géricault. The colors are more mixed, the forms don’t have definition and the composition is very weird to these years. Then ¿Why this picture was considerate a Romanticism paint and don’t like an Impressionism paint?

The topic of this picture makes this picture very romanticism. One of the recurrent topics of this style was show the force of the nature against the human, that’s called by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant like the Sublime. In the picture we can see the shipwreck of a slavery ship, destroyed by the force of the sea. In the sea, the bodies floating around the fragments of the ship and was eating by the fishes of the sea. The fishes have a monster aspect, this like metaphor of the massacre happened. That’s all product of the imagination of William Turner, caused he never watch this event. The main reference about this event was a lines of the poet James Thompson in his poem The Seasons. Is very political and personal picture of Turner, a speech against the slavery, one of the first demonstrations of political art.