The Humanistic Tradition, Book 5 Romanticism, Realism, and the Nineteenth-Century World

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CHAPTER 27 The Romantic View of Nature 15

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Turner began his career by making elegant drawings of
Gothic ruins and popular tourist sites in England and
Wales. These he sold to engravers, who mass-produced and
marketed them. One of his early drawings, an intricate pen-
cil sketch of the ruined monastery of Tintern Abbey, cap-
tures with some nostalgia the transient beauty of the
medieval past (see Figure 27.3). Between 1814 and 1830,
Turner traveled extensively throughout England and the
Continent, making landscape studies of the mountains and
lakes of Switzerland, the breathtaking reaches of the Alps,
and the picturesque cities of Italy. His European tours
inspired hundreds of rapid pencil sketches and luminous,
eloquent studies executed in the spontaneous (and
portable) medium of watercolor. His large-scale paintings of
Venice, glorious explorations of the play of light on water,
were among the most sought after of his travel canvases.
In his mature style, the lyricism of Turner’s early works
gave way to impassioned studies of nature’s more turbulent
moods. Natural disasters—great storms and Alpine ava-
lanches—and human catastrophes, such as shipwrecks and
fires, became metaphors for human vulnerability before the
forces of nature. Such expressions of the “sublime”—the
terror human beings experience in the face of nature’s
overpowering forces—occupied the Romantic imagina-
tion. The sea, a symbol of nature’s indomitable power,

prevails as a Romantic theme in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s

Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), Herman Melville’s

monumental novel Moby Dick (1851), and Théodore

Géricault’s The Raft of the “Medusa” (see Figure 29.4),

which Turner had seen in London.

InThe Slave Shipof 1840 (Figure 27.9), the glowing sun-

set, turbulent seas, impending storm, and fantastic fish

(that appear to devour the remains of the shackled body in

the right foreground) do not immediately reveal the horror

of the subject described in the original title: Slavers

Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying: Typhoon Coming

On. While Britain had finally abolished slavery throughout

its colonies in 1838, popular literature on the history of the

slave trade published in 1839 recounted in some detail the

notorious activity that inspired Turner’s painting: the

transatlantic traders’ practice of throwing overboard the

malnourished and disease-ridden bodies of African slaves,

and then collecting insurance money on “goods lost” at sea.

On the threshold of rising British commercialism (see

chapter 30), Turner seems to suggest that the human capac-

ity for evil rivals nature’s cruelest powers.

Two years later, in Snowstorm (Figure 27.10), Turner

mounted his own Romantic engagement with nature: the

67-year-old artist claimed that, at his request, sailors lashed

him to the mast of a ship caught for hours in a storm at sea

Figure 27.9J. M. W. TURNER, The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying:
Typhoon Coming On), 1840. Oil on canvas, 35^3 ⁄ 4 in. 4 ft.^1 ⁄ 4 in. Turner infused many of his paintings with a
golden glow, achieved by working from a white (rather than a dark) ground and by the use of new yellow
pigments commercially available after 1817. His detractors accused Turner of “yellow fever.”