Joseph Mallord William Turner's Slavers Throwing Overboard the
Dead and Dying: Typhon Coming On, commonly referred to as The
Slave Ship, completed in 1840, shows the painter's use of
brilliant color and atmospheric effects, elements that would
later influence the Impressionists. Panegyrized by John Ruskin
as the "noblest sea . . . ever painted by man," the Slave Ship
was ridiculed by other critics, one of whom called it a "gross
outrage on nature." Mark Twain's assessment, penciled in the
notebook he kept in 1878, was succinct: "Slave ShipCat having a
fit in a platter of tomatoes." The Mark Twain Papers includes
some 50 notebooks kept by Mark Twain between 1855 and 1910.
Thirty of these notebooks, through 1891, have been published in
three volumes by the Mark Twain Project and the University of
California Press. UC Berkeley Library | Bancroft Library | MTP
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