The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
J. M. W. Turner · Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying: Typhon coming on · oil on canvas, landscape format, an exhibition picture · shown at the Royal Academy in 1840 with lines from the painter’s manuscript poem Fallacies of Hope · Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, since 1899 · the single canvas scored, as it now stands
Mode
History painting of an atrocity at sea, the history nearly dissolved into weather and colour; the marine picture and the sublime landscape fused
Mythos
The sea as judge and devourer; the coming storm as retribution; the sun presiding as an eye or a wound; the Deluge, Jonah and the Apocalypse evoked in the creatures and the sky
Phase
The case of the Zong, 1781, shown at the Royal Academy in 1840, the year of the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, when the painter was sixty-five
Presentation
Oil on canvas, landscape format; the sun at the centre, its light poured down the middle into the sea; the ship small at the left; the drowned in fragments at the lower right; shown with its title and lines from the painter’s poem
Register
The sublime of terror, dreadful and gorgeous at once; dropping into the grotesque at the lower right, where the creatures are
Scale
One ship, one sea, one sunset and one coming storm; the trade and its law in a title and a line of verse
Governing Proposition
A slave ship heels into a coming typhoon at the left of the canvas, and a blood red sun sets at its centre, pouring its light down the middle of the field into a heaving sea. Only later does the eye find, in the water at the lower right, a dark leg in a manacle and chain, hands and limbs among the waves, and fish and sea creatures crowding toward them. The wager of the picture is that a moral subject of the gravest kind can be carried by colour and light with the figures nearly gone, and that the order in which the canvas is seen, splendour first and the drowned last, can be the truth it tells about the world’s attention.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The canvas is oil, in landscape format, an exhibition picture and not a large one, and it hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Sea and sky are nearly the whole of it. At the centre a sun is setting, blood red and yellow, burning through the cloud, and its light is poured down the middle of the canvas into a heaving sea, so that a road of colour runs from the sky toward the viewer. Storm cloud closes from the left and from above. At the left, in the middle distance, a ship heels into the storm with its masts bare. It is small, and it is already half lost in the weather.
The eye goes first to the sun and the burning water, and only afterward to the lower right. There, in the water, is a dark leg with a manacle and chain on it. Hands and limbs show among the waves; chains float on the surface; fish and fanciful sea creatures crowd toward the bodies, and gulls wheel above. The drowned are given in fragments, a leg and hands, not as counted bodies. The figures are small, and everything else on the canvas is weather. The red light of the sun lies on the waves exactly where the bodies are.
There are no words on the canvas. What it has to say it says with light, colour and proportion, and with the title under which it was shown: Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying: Typhon coming on. The title gives the deed and the judgment approaching it. On the canvas the deed is done in a corner, and the judgment, the typhoon, has not yet struck. Between them is the sun, presiding over both.
Movement II
Turner showed the picture at the Royal Academy in 1840, at sixty-five, with lines from his own manuscript poem Fallacies of Hope, which close: “Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope! / Where is thy market now?” The subject is the case of the slave ship Zong, in 1781, whose master threw well over a hundred living captives overboard so that the loss could be claimed on insurance as jettison. The canvas was shown in the year of the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, two years after British colonial apprenticeship ended. A deed of 1781 was put before the public in a year of abolition.
What Turner inherited was threefold. There was the Dutch and English marine picture, ships and weather. There was history painting, which treats past moral events in legible figures. And there was the modern disaster picture, Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa of 1819 above all, which had already made an atrocity at sea into a history painting, its victims drawn large and in full view. Turner turned all three. He made a history painting in which the history is nearly dissolved into weather and colour, the figures reduced to fragments in a lower corner, and the moral subject carried by light rather than by drawn bodies and gesture.
The stake was real. The press had been mocking his manner for a decade, and he offered a public subject of the gravest kind, at the Academy’s own exhibition, in that manner; the hostile press seized on the foreground. Yet the turn was a wager placed partly on his proven path. The vortex of storm and sun was already his, from Snow Storm: Hannibal in 1812 to the sea pieces of the 1830s. What was new was to set an atrocity inside it, and to let the vortex carry the moral weight that history painting had always laid on its figures.
Movement III
What the picture brings into the open can be stated, and it holds. An atrocity of commerce was committed under a beautiful sky, and the beauty is indifferent to it. A trade that reckoned people as cargo, insured them and jettisoned them, is answered by a sea that takes cargo and people alike. “Where is thy market now?”: the line sharpens the commercial meaning, and whether its market condemns the traders or the public that profited is one of the questions the picture has kept open. But the image carries its meaning without the line. The chain is on the leg, the light is on the drowned, and the storm is coming for the ship.
A second truth is sharper, and the picture makes it rather than states it. The eye sees the sunset first and the leg only later, so that the order of looking repeats the order of the world’s attention: splendour first, the drowned last. That is disclosure through image, and it is the canvas’s strongest. It is also its doubt. The victims are so subordinate that a public could take the picture as a sea piece and set the slaves aside, and its most famous admirer did. Much of what it gives is the storm as mood, terror and splendour, and a mood ranks below a meaning. The disclosure is real and is held short of the summit by its own method.
Under the case lie older patterns, and some are built into the canvas. The sea is judge and devourer, taking the guilty and the innocent alike. The typhoon “coming on” is retribution moving toward a ship that has just done murder. The sun presides like an eye, or a wound. The composition is the sentence: the light falls on the victims, the storm comes for the ship. Other patterns are only evoked: the Deluge, Jonah and Leviathan in the sea creatures, the apocalyptic sky of Revelation, the setting of an empire’s sun. The judgment is promised and not shown, for the typhoon has not struck, and the monsters bring myth in as illustration rather than as structure.
Movement IV
Paint the same deed as Géricault painted the Medusa, the figures large and legible in the foreground, and the canvas becomes a protest about the drowned. Painted as it is, the drowned are found late, small and in pieces, inside a splendour that fills nine tenths of the field, and the knowledge becomes knowledge about looking: how the world’s attention goes to the spectacle and finds the victims last. That knowledge exists only as this proportion and this colour. The red of the sun and the red on the water where the bodies are is one red, so that the beauty and the horror cannot be looked at apart. The form is the instrument of the knowledge.
The making bears the weight. The sun and its reflection are built of thin glazes over a light ground, with scumbled and scraped passages, so that the light seems to come from inside the paint. The sea is made of loaded, dragged strokes that keep its weight and motion. The storm is laid in dark veils over warm underlayers, so that it closes without going dead. Colour is held at full pitch, hot yellow and red against blue grey, without collapse into mud. And one law governs the whole: sky, sea, ship and bodies are made of one substance, colour moved by weather, and the light that makes the sky glorious is the light that lies on the drowned. From the sun to the chain, nothing stands outside it.
Except at the bottom. The fish and sea creatures, and the limbs among them, are painted in another register: drawn as things rather than as light, with little authority, almost cartoon at the lower right. A second law enters there, the law of illustration and the grotesque, and it breaks the physics at the very place where it matters most. It lowers the sublime where it should be highest, and their number could be halved without loss. The ship, too, is summary even for distance, and some of the sea at the right is worked rather than achieved. The charge is real and it is not disqualifying: everywhere else the making is at the top of the medium.
Movement V
The canvas was shown at the Academy in 1840 and came to John Ruskin, who made it his chosen exemplar in the first volume of Modern Painters in 1843, praising its sea, the noblest, he held, that Turner painted, and setting the slaves aside. He later sold it. It passed through New York and has been on public view in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, since 1899. The image is whole: nothing that carries its meaning is lost. It has outlived early ridicule, its owner’s discomfort with it, and a long phase in which it was admired as colour with its subject forgotten. Turner’s late materials and methods are known to be unstable, and the condition record of this canvas is not known here; that is the one charge against its survival.
The literature has turned more than once. Ruskin’s sea came first. In America the picture met admiration mixed with ridicule. The twentieth century read it as a forerunner of abstraction, colour without subject. From the late twentieth century the subject returned, through postcolonial criticism and art history, and through David Dabydeen’s long poem Turner (1994), which answers the picture by name. The questions remain open: whether the picture is abolitionist or aestheticises atrocity; whom the poem’s market condemns; whether Ruskin’s parting with it was grief or embarrassment. They turn, all of them, on the same few features, the sun, the leg and the proportion between them.
Its reach in painting belongs largely to Turner’s late manner as a whole, which Monet and Pissarro knew in London in 1870 and 1871 and later critics read as a prelude to abstraction; this canvas is one of its emblems, and its particular reach is in criticism and in the literature of the Atlantic slave trade. It stands with The Fighting Temeraire and Rain, Steam and Speed, each at 8.6, higher than either in terror and in the turns of its reception, lower for its foreground. The Raft of the Medusa, the work it answers, stands a tenth above at 8.7, on legible figures and a wider reach in French painting; The Third of May 1808 at 9.0 and Guernica at 9.1, which put the victims at the centre, stand well above. That gap is the picture’s choice. In Boston the sun still burns at the centre, and the leg is still found last.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged by subtraction. Take away the sun and the sea has no source: the light is the picture’s spine, and it falls straight onto the place of the drowning. Take away the ship and the deed has no agent; it is small, fleeing and already half lost, and that smallness is the verdict. Take away the leg and the chain and the canvas becomes a sunset storm, for the atrocity lives in a few strokes at the lower right, the most necessary on it. Take away the typhoon and the promised judgment is gone. What gives is the margin: the fish and sea creatures are permitted, not compelled, and could be halved without loss; the gulls are filler.
Score: 8.3 / 10
What the picture brings into the open can be stated and holds. An atrocity of commerce was committed under a beautiful sky, and the beauty is indifferent to it; a trade that reckoned people as cargo, insured and jettisoned, is answered by a sea that takes cargo and people alike. A second, sharper truth is made rather than stated: the eye finds the sunset first and the leg only later, so that the order of looking repeats the order of the world’s attention. That truth is also the picture’s doubt. The victims are so subordinate that the canvas could be taken for a sea piece with its subject set aside, and much of what it gives is the storm as mood, which ranks below a meaning.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The elevation is the sublime of terror in Burke’s sense, at the top of its kind, and it rises in more than one place: the sun burning through the cloud at the centre, its colour bleeding down the water toward the viewer; the storm closing from the left and above, a wall of dark; the trough of the sea under the ship; and the red light lying on the waves where the bodies are, so that the beauty and the horror are one colour. The register is dreadful and gorgeous at once, which is the picture’s power and its offence. It is held at 9.0 and not above, because at the very place of the deed the fish and the monstrous mouths read as illustration and bring the eye down from the sublime into the grotesque.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The particular holds: a real case, a real trade, a shackled leg. Some of the archetypes are built into it. The sea is judge and devourer, taking the guilty and the innocent alike; the typhoon “coming on” is retribution moving toward a ship that has just done murder; the sun presides as an eye, or a wound. The composition is the sentence: the light falls on the victims and the storm comes for the ship. Other patterns are evoked rather than built: the Deluge, Jonah and Leviathan in the sea creatures, the apocalyptic sky of Revelation, an empire’s setting sun. Held below the gate because the judgment is promised and not shown, the storm not yet struck, and the monsters bring myth in as illustration rather than as structure.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is the Dutch and English marine picture, ships and weather; history painting, which treats past moral events in legible figures; and the modern disaster picture, Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1819) above all, which had already made an atrocity at sea into history painting. The departure is a history painting in which the history is nearly dissolved into weather and colour, the figures reduced to fragments in a lower corner and the moral subject carried by light rather than by drawn bodies and gesture. The stake was real: a painter of sixty-five offering the gravest public subject at the Academy, in a manner the press had mocked for a decade. Held at 8.6 because the vortex of storm and sun was already his own, from Snow Storm: Hannibal in 1812 to the sea pieces of the 1830s.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Substitute another form and the picture stops knowing its chief thing. Paint the same deed as Géricault painted the Medusa, the figures large and legible in the foreground, and the canvas becomes a protest about the drowned. Painted as it is, the drowned are found late, small and in pieces, inside a splendour that fills nine tenths of the field, and the knowledge becomes knowledge about looking: how the world’s attention goes to the spectacle and finds the victims last. That knowledge exists only as this proportion and this colour, the red of the sun and the red on the water being one red. The form is the instrument. Held short of the top because the fragmented foreground is not wholly controlled: it is painted in a different, more illustrative register than the rest.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence over promise, across 186 years, and a literature that has not closed and has turned more than once. Ruskin read it as a sea, the noblest Turner painted, with the slaves set aside. In America it met admiration mixed with ridicule. The twentieth century read it as a forerunner of abstraction, colour without subject; from the late twentieth century the subject returned, through postcolonial criticism and art history and through David Dabydeen’s long poem Turner (1994). The open questions are real: whether the picture is abolitionist or aestheticises atrocity; whether the poem’s “market” condemns the traders or the public; whether Ruskin’s parting with it was grief or embarrassment. Held below the top because the questions turn on the same few features.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Published and long seen, so force and reach are scored together. The force is a real reorganisation of what history painting could be: a moral subject of the gravest kind carried by colour and light with the figures nearly gone, the extreme instance of Turner’s late fusion of marine, history and sublime landscape. In its own field, British painting of the 1840s, it moved little directly; the larger reach belongs to the late manner as a whole, which Monet and Pissarro knew in London in 1870 and 1871 and later critics read as a prelude to abstraction. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Ruskin’s chosen exemplar in the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), and so part of the founding of modern criticism of painting in English; answered by name in the literature of the Atlantic slave trade, in Dabydeen’s Turner; discounted for a reach shared with the body of late work.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 186 years. The form is whole: the image is the one Turner made, and nothing that carries its meaning is lost. Its presence has held. Shown at the Academy in 1840, owned by Ruskin and then sold, in New York before Boston, it has been on public view in the Museum of Fine Arts since 1899, and it has outlived early ridicule, its owner’s discomfort with it, and a long phase in which it was admired as colour with its subject forgotten. Its standing is as high as ever, and its subject has given it a second life. Fame lifts the figure only a little. The charge is on the fabric: Turner’s late materials and methods are known to be unstable, and this canvas’s condition record is not known here.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Command of oil at exhibition scale, and load-bearing. The sun and its reflection are built of thin glazes over a light ground, with scumbled and scraped passages, so that the light seems to come from inside the paint; the sea is made of loaded, dragged strokes that keep its weight and motion; the storm is laid in dark veils over warm underlayers, so that it closes without going dead; and colour is held at full pitch, hot yellow and red against blue grey, without collapse into mud. The costs are charged. The ship is summary even for distance; the foreground creatures and limbs are drawn with little authority, almost cartoon at the lower right, and the hostile press seized on them; some passages of the sea at the right are worked rather than achieved.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the sun at the centre, all light and dissolution, and the manacled leg at the lower right, all hard fact. One law holds them. Everything in the field is subject to the same light and the same storm, and the light that makes the sky glorious is the light that lies on the drowned. Sky, sea, ship and bodies are made of one substance, colour moved by weather, and nothing stands outside it; the range, from cosmic light to a chain, is wide for one canvas. What resists is a second law entering at the bottom: the fish and sea creatures belong to illustration and the grotesque, drawn as things rather than as light, and they break the physics at the very place where it matters most.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Several orders are held in one field: the natural order and the cosmos, in sun, storm and sea; commerce and the state, in a trade and an insurance law that the poem’s “market” names; the body, in chains and fragments; history, in a case of 1781 shown in 1840, a year of abolition; the sacred, as judgment by storm; and the watcher’s consciousness, made the subject by the order in which the image is seen. One light integrates them. What holds the axis lowest is what is present only by implication: no family, no labour seen except as cargo, no persons with faces, no community; the trade’s whole apparatus is a ship at a distance. It is a single scene, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime and The Imperishable at 9.0, The Made at 8.9, The Living Form and The Bottomless Well at 8.8. A sublime of terror that rises in the sun, the storm, the trough and the red on the water, so that beauty and horror are one colour; an image whole and in public view for 186 years, which has outlived ridicule and an age that forgot its subject; a command of glaze, scumble and loaded stroke in which the light seems to come from inside the paint; a form whose proportion is its knowledge; and a reception that has turned more than once and has not closed.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.7: nature, commerce, the body, history, the sacred and the watcher are held by one light, but family, labour and community are present only by implication, there are no persons with faces, and the trade is a ship at a distance. Above it, and below the rest, The Inevitable at 8.3, and The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 8.4: the sea creatures are permitted rather than compelled; the victims are so subordinate that the disclosure is in doubt; the judgment is promised, not shown, and the monsters bring myth in as illustration. The limits meet at one place, the lower right, where the deed is: small by design, and painted there in a weaker register than the rest.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.9, The Living Form at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on two of its five: The Imperishable at 9.0, The Swerve at 8.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 each fall short by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.3, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.7. The twelve sum to 103.0 and average 8.58, which displays as 8.6, below the 9.0 the summit also requires; the standing in Tier IV is settled on the gate and on the aggregate alike.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the canvas as it hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, of its composition and of its literature; knowledge of its present physical condition and of any technical study of its surface is thin, and survival and making are weighed with that in mind. The work scored is the single canvas as it now stands, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1840 under the title Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying: Typhon coming on; the lines from Fallacies of Hope shown with it bear on what the work disclosed to its first public, but the image is scored as the image. Not in the unit: Turner’s other sea pieces, among them Snow Storm: Hannibal of 1812, which enter only where this canvas’s turn and reach must be divided from his manner’s; the poem beyond the lines exhibited; Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, which is inheritance; and Ruskin’s prose and Dabydeen’s Turner, which are reception, weighed on reach, never as the object. The only words quoted are the title and the two closing lines shown with the picture. Facts that could not be verified are not given or are stated as open, among them the exact dimensions, how the museum acquired the canvas, how and when Ruskin came to own it and when he sold it, the names of its owners in New York, the earlier lines of the poem, the published accounts of the case current in 1840, the names of the critics who mocked the picture and of the American writers who ridiculed it, the titles of particular later studies, the size of the ship on the canvas, and the condition and conservation record of the canvas.