William Turner and the Memories of Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature

Joseph Mallord William Turner's painting Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying - Typhon Coming on (1840) shows a slave ship against the background of a blood-red sunset. When the seascape painting was first exhibited at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1840, it was highly criticised, not so much for its topic, but for the way of its execution: Floating iron chains, fragments of dead bodies and strange-looking fish confused the beholders and disturbed them in different ways. The only one defending the artist's late work was John Ruskin, who mentioned the painting in his famous description “Of Water as Painted by Turner" in Modern Painters I. When, after hanging from 1843 to 1869 in the privacy of Ruskin's home Denmark Hill, the painting was sent to New York and exhibited again, it troubled art critics and the public once more. One reason for this might have been the way in which Turner visually comes to terms with the memory of slavery. My paper argues that Turner's Slave Ship is one of the most outstanding history paintings on this subject because it is one of the most disturbing ones. In it, Turner gives an empathetic view on the dreadful, and most often deadly experience of colonial slavery by creating an unreal, traumatic vision, which seems to have come straight out of a nightmare. Yet, the disturbing cruelty of the painting lies not so much in what can be seen, but in what remains unseen. Few other paintings of the nineteenth century represent the traumatic experience of colonial slavery as it is: not representable.