J.M.W. Turner’s The Slave Ship was first exhibited in 1840. Its original title was Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhon coming on, a description that makes the painting’s subject explicit.
Turner showed a slave ship disappearing into a violent sea while enslaved people are thrown overboard. The work was likely connected to accounts of the Zong massacre and appeared during a period of renewed British and international abolitionist campaigning. Its display at the Royal Academy coincided with major anti-slavery conventions in London, giving the painting a powerful political context as well as its dramatic visual effect.
The work’s swirling color and turbulent atmosphere initially unsettled some critics, who thought its style too abstract or exaggerated. John Ruskin later defended it passionately, helping establish its reputation. Today the painting is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A frequent mistake is to treat 1840 as only the date of the canvas; it is also the year Turner first presented it publicly.