Regarding Turner

‘I did not paint it to be understood, but I wished to show what such a scene was like.’ Turner’s comment on ‘Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth’, a picture he made in 1842, travels, as it were, in two directions. On the one hand, it feels defensive: do artists, in any medium, in any era, not wish to be understood? On the other, it speaks to a raw creative impulse: to represent something as one sees it. In this painting there is no division between sea and sky, the waves both rough and fine. In the middle sits the boat, drowned in darkness, at the heart of the maritime vortex. The artist claimed to have been caught up in the tempest at Harwich in Essex, but critics now agree he wasn’t telling the truth. Even as it sought to depict a very worldly incident, this scene emerged from the eye of his mind.

Joseph Mallord William Turner, born in London in 1775, was 250 years old last year. Widely considered one of the best artists that Britain has produced, his birthday was celebrated with events and exhibitions across the country. ‘JMW Turner and Changing Visions of Landscape’, ‘Turner: Always Contemporary’ and ‘Turner’s Kingdom: Beauty, Birds and Beast’ are just some of the shows staged to commemorate the man whose technical and thematic experimentation, despite prompting bemusement and criticism during his lifetime, is now recognised as having reimagined what painting could do. Such experimentation was not only formal, in terms of colour and materials, but also ethical, in terms of how art engaged with the world. Indeed, the title of the last-named show, held at Turner’s House, the villa in Twickenham where the artist lived for a time with his father, suggests that he was in the business of making worlds, and that the one we are living in was partly shaped by him.

In the way it seeks to capture an imagined lived experience, ‘Snow Storm’ evinces what the art historian Sam Smiles has described as Turner’s ‘commitment to the image as […] articulating truths that were inexpressible in any other way’. More powerful still is a work from two years earlier that confirms the so-called ‘painter of light’ was also a recorder of darkness. The original title of ‘The Slave Ship’ (1840) when it was first shown at the Royal Academy spelled out what it depicts: ‘Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhon coming on’. In a turbulent sea scene, we see a manacled leg surrounded by monstrous-looking fish, and hands just above the water’s surface, trying in vain to hold on to life. In the distance, the ship on which the dying people were cargo is making off, lighter than it was a few minutes earlier, but with any conscience the vessel has surely weighed down. Beneath an attractive sunset, composed of rich reds, oranges and yellows, there is murder motivated by greed.

In Turner and the Slave Trade (2025), Sam Smiles observes that Turner’s picture ‘seems to bear witness to [his] personal disgust with the institution of slavery’; slavery had officially been abolished in the British Empire in 1833. But, as Smiles shows, ‘whatever opinion Turner held in 1840 did not coincide with what he had believed earlier in his life, for in 1805 he had invested in a consortium to buy an agricultural estate in Jamaica that would use its enslaved workforce to turn a profit.’

Smiles’s extensively researched and well-written book tracks Turner’s ‘ethical journey’ around enslavement and the context in which it took place. While the penultimate chapter offers a detailed visual analysis of ‘The Slave Ship’, most of the book focuses on how the artist came to be involved with the Dry Sugar Work Pen in Middlesex County, Jamaica and the broader Caribbean plantation economy, which drove the expansion of Britain at the expense of black lives. Whether motivated by money or seduced by propaganda that romanticised plantation life, Turner parted with £100 in the knowledge that profits would depend on enslaved labour. The scheme ended up failing, but it got going just as ‘the long campaign for the abolition of the slave trade was poised for victory’, putting the painter at odds with the mood of the day.

‘The Slave Ship’, like ‘Snow Storm’ later, emerged from the eye of Turner’s mind. (Smiles persuasively rejects the long-held argument that the painting was based on the Zong massacre of 1781, in which more than 130 enslaved people were thrown overboard a British ship travelling from Ghana to Jamaica.) It was also a deeply felt public statement on slavery. David Dabydeen’s vivid 1994 long poem ‘Turner’, traces the traumas of the African diaspora, which knows too well how the sea ‘decorates, violates’. The art critic John Ruskin, Turner’s first champion, described the picture as featuring ‘the noblest sea that Turner ever painted…the noblest certainly ever painted by man’. But as Dabydeen mentions in the preface to his poem, for Ruskin, ‘the shackling and drowning of Africans was relegated to a brief footnote’. Ruskin sold ‘The Slave Ship’ after the death of his father, who had bought it for him as a gift, on account of its disturbing subject matter.

Following a landmark year for the man who has come closest to being Britain’s national painter, what does knowing that he was an investor in chattel slavery mean? It does not, to my mind, mean we should no longer look at – or appreciate – his work, or prevent others from doing so. Instead, it means looking at Turner and his pictures with a fuller, clearer eye: with more interest in what was going on around him and what fed into what he made, including the colonial connections of many of his patrons, but also with more interest in what has come in his wake.

And to return to the vortex of ‘Snow Storm’, in December 2025, Nnena Kalu won the Turner Prize, in part for her beguiling vortex paintings. Their swirling, raucous lines in pencil and pastel are a world away from Turner’s oils, and yet, in their shared vigour, the two somehow meet. ‘It’s like listening to the sound of the sea coming in and out,’ said Charlotte Hollinshead, who has long worked with Kalu, born in Glasgow to Nigerian parents and now living in London. A child of the diaspora in touch with the painter of the sea, who both denounced slavery and tried to earn out of it. It’s almost as if 250 years were nothing at all.

Paul Mellon Centre: Turner and the Slave Trade

Franklin Nelson

Franklin Nelson works for the Financial Times, commissioning and writing on UK politics, the economy and society as well as books and the arts.