J. M. W. Turner · 1840
The Slave Ship
Posters from $10.82 USD · Canvas from $28.14 USD
Ships anywhere in the USA
Turner's seething seascape — the Zong massacre rendered as howling color and storm. Ruskin called it "the noblest sea ever painted." Boston MFA's most important canvas.
Up to 10.7 × 8 in · landscape
Size
Larger sizes are unavailable for this painting because the source scan's resolution wouldn't print at gallery quality.
Format & finish
Archival cotton canvas stretched over a wooden frame. Ready to hang as-is. No external frame.
Scale next to a 5'10" person
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Materials & quality
›Canvas & inks
Giclée-printed on archival cotton canvas with fade-resistant pigment inks, hand-stretched over wooden bars. Gallery-wrapped — ready to hang with no extra frame needed.
›Floater frame
Hand-finished solid wood floater frame in five finishes. The canvas sits inside with a clean shadow gap — the way galleries hang contemporary canvas.
›Posters
Premium archival paper — 200 gsm soft matte or 230 gsm vibrant glossy. Ships flat or rolled, ready for your own frame.
›Faithful to the source
Printed from the highest-resolution museum and archive scans available. Each painting's maximum size is capped at what its source scan can support at gallery quality.
The story of The Slave Ship
The sky is on fire, the sea is the color of rust and blood, and in the foreground, if you let yourself look, there are shackled hands and legs in the water with fish already at them. Turner painted it in 1840, taking the story from the Zong, a ship whose captain had thrown sick captives overboard to claim the insurance. The critic John Ruskin owned it for a while and then could not stand to live with it. It is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. From across a room it is one of the most beautiful sunsets ever painted; from close up it is an indictment.
On a wall, the painting is a blaze of orange, gold, and crimson over a sea of rust and slate, with a small black ship leaning into the storm on the left. It is a piece for a study, a library, a den, or a hallway where it will be seen by people who know what it is, and it suits traditional, moody, and book-lined interiors. Our source image supports the Mini at 10.7 × 8 in, which makes this a close-viewing print: hang it at eye level by a desk or a reading chair, or give it a place in a gallery wall of sea pictures where its color will pull everything else together.
Turner's The Fighting Temeraire is the calmer sunset he painted the year before, Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa is the other great Romantic painting about people abandoned at sea, and Aivazovsky's The Ninth Wave shows what the same light looks like with hope in it. More from J. M. W. Turner.
Printed in our studio from a public-domain photograph of the Boston canvas, without cooling the reds or hiding the figures in the water.
J. M. W. Turner
Joseph Mallord William Turner, known in his time as William Turner, was an English Romantic painter, printmaker and watercolourist. He is known for his expressive colouring, imaginative landscapes and turbulent, often violent marine paintings. His artistic style developed over his lifetime, moving away from Romanticism—bypassing the following rising style of Realism—and, instead, with his later works being a significant precursor of and presaging the later Impressionist and Abstract Art movements that arose in the decades after his death. He left behind more than 550 oil paintings, 2,000 watercolours, and 30,000 works on paper. He was championed by the leading English art critic John Ruskin from 1840, and is today regarded as having elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting. In 1969 art historian Kenneth Clark wrote of Turner: "He was a genius of the first order—far the greatest painter that England has ever produced..."
All J. M. W. Turner prints →Biography adapted from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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