Artist’s Corner-For Black History Month-J. M.W. Turner’s Slave Ship

Sometimes, to paraphrase the old saw about a picture telling more than one thousand words, a painting or film will tell more about what was going on in a society than a million books or speeches on the subject. Once can think a Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and the scene against the black and white film of the red coat of a little girl walking in what amounted to her death in the concentration camp and the later shot of that same red coat on a pile of clothes to tell more than a lot of speeches about the horrors inflicted there. Similarly the short scene in the film Amistad when dead and sick slaves going through the Middle Passage are slipped overboard as a matter of course to know the repugnance of slavery.          

J.M.W. Turner, himself a slavery abolitionist, did the same thing with his masterpiece Slave Ship for an earlier generation to graphically show what that institution was all about. Amazingly his style was based on color schemes rather than defined bodies and other details like the fish and sea monsters circling in for a feast which makes the whole scene that much more compelling. Hopefully that painting, as Turner intended it, turned its viewers to action against that vile institution. It certainly affected me the first time I saw it in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston almost over a hundred and fifty years later. If you are in Boston go to the second floor of the old building where the artists of the Romantic period in European painting are exhibited and spent a few moments looking at the details of this one.