The Slave Ship

Under a blazing, blood-red sunset a churning sea swallows the shackled limbs of enslaved people thrown overboard from a distant ship, dark fish and gulls converging on the drowning. Turner based the picture on the notorious Zong atrocity, in which a slaver cast its human cargo into the sea to claim insurance, and he meant it as a furious indictment of the slave trade. Now in Boston, the Slave Ship turns his luminous seascape genius to moral horror - beauty and atrocity fused, the glory of the sunset made to witness an unspeakable crime.