Focus on this artwork and explore the Reception and criticism.
When The Slave Ship was first displayed at Royal Academy of Arts in 1840, it attracted the attention of critics who were dismayed by the horrific subject matter and abstracted style. For instance, one famous review by William Makepeace Thackeray poses the rhetorical question, "Is the painting sublime or ridiculous? Indeed I don't know which." Others harped on Turner's use of color and fixation on nature's devastation.After John Ruskin was gifted the painting by his father in 1844, he wrote an essay published in Modern Painters which detailed his appreciation for the work. The text became famous and influenced the public's understanding of the painting. His writing places the viewer directly in front of the painting, developing an emotional response to the painting's sublimity. As a result of Ruskin's writing, the actual painting was not necessarily needed for people to feel that they had experienced it. Ruskin's celebration of the piece is evident as he writes, "If I were reduced to rest Turner's immortality upon any single work, I should choose this." Ruskin did have his own critics though; most notably, Mark Twain. In his 1880 book A Tramp Abroad, Volume 1, Chapter XXIV, he declaimed:
" What a red rag is to a bull, Turner's "Slave Ship" was to me, before I studied art. Mr. Ruskin is educated in art up to a point where that picture throws him into as mad an ecstasy of pleasure as it used to throw me into one of rage, last year, when I was ignorant. His cultivation enables him—and me, now—to see water in that glaring yellow mud, and natural effects in those lurid explosions of mixed smoke and flame, and crimson sunset glories; it reconciles him—and me, now—to the floating of iron cable-chains and other unfloatable things; it reconciles us to fishes swimming around on top of the mud—I mean the water. The most of the picture is a manifest impossibility—that is to say, a lie; and only rigid cultivation can enable a man to find truth in a lie."
Ruskin eventually sold the painting in 1872 to be exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it sparked public interest after Ruskin's publication, and became highly regarded for its atmospheric effects. However, in effect of this attention to solely the aestheticism of the piece over the subject matter, this reaction also generated backlash among critics. As one New York Times critic put it, "It is the great artists vision of a slaver in peril at sea that the average art pilgrim looks for. He finds only a miracle of light and color."After The Slave Ship was put on auction in 1876, Alice Hooper purchased it and put it on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where it is displayed today. The painting was featured independently in the main gallery of the museum and accompanied by handouts of Ruskin's famous essay and a museum curated description that related the visible attributes of the piece to the history of the slave trade and the abolitionist context that underlies it. As viewers gained a greater understanding of the historic and ethical themes behind Turner's painting, audiences began to consider whether the aesthetic treatment of the subject was appropriate.
Royal Academy of Arts Modern Painters aestheticism John Ruskin William Makepeace Thackeray Boston sublime Museum of Fine Arts A Tramp Abroad Metropolitan Museum of Art