Turner's Slave Ship George P. Landow , Professor of English and Art History, Brown University Note: numbers divided by a slash within brackets, such as "[111/112]", indicate the page numbers of the ouriginal Routledge print edition. They have been included for readers wishing to cite the print rather than the internet version of the book. To make the spectator participate vicariously in the scene taking place upon the raft, had to join a major image observed from nearby with one observed at a distance. Turner, a master at manipulating codes and conventions, makes a particularly effective contrast between distant and near views in The Slave Ship . When Ruskin , who once owned the picture, described it in the chapter 'Of Water, as Painted by Turner' in the first volume of Modern Painters , he correctly placed major emphasis upon the way Turner created an image of shipwreck as punishment. After an elaborate purple passage that describes the various colors and forms of the heaving waters, he turns to that part of the ocean surrounding the slave-ship: Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast upon the mist of night, which gathers cold and low, advancing like the shallow of death upon the guilty ship as it labours amidst the lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, and mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight, and, cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea. | |
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