Introduction

As noted in this book's introduction, David Dabydeen's ‘Turner’ takes its inspiration from J. M. W. Turner's celebrated painting, The Slave Ship (Fig. 1.1). This canvas was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1840 (the same year as the first World Anti- Slavery Convention) and is generally agreed to be based on the Zong massacre of 1781 (discussed shortly in more detail below), one of the most notorious episodes in the four-hundred-year history of the transatlantic slave trade.

While Dabydeen readily appreciates The Slave Ship in aesthetic terms – he calls it Turner's ‘finest painting in the sublime style’ (Turner 7) and has more recently confessed his ‘love’ for the artist and the ‘epic dimensions’ of his art (qtd. in Macedo 187) – he is nonetheless perturbed by what he sees as the undercurrents to Turner's vision, as becomes clear from the preface's last paragraph: ‘The intensity of Turner's painting is such,’ Dabydeen concludes, that ‘the artist in private must have savoured the sadism he publicly denounced’ (8).

Whatever the validity or otherwise of this assertion, the true villain of the piece, in Dabydeen's view, is not so much the possibly perverse artist as his admiring contemporary critic and apologist, John Ruskin, who not only gives a rapturous ekphrastic account of The Slave Ship in ‘Of Water, as Painted by Turner’, a chapter included in the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), but also came to own the picture when his father presented it to him on 1 January 1844 as a New Year's gift. For Dabydeen, the problem with Ruskin's reading of The Slave Ship is that it emphasises artistic technique – ‘dwelling on the genius with which Turner illuminate[s] sea and sky’ – at the expense of the painting's egregious ‘subject’, the ‘shackling and drowning of Africans’ carried out in the name of financial self-interest. As Dabydeen suggests, such a reading is doubly problematic because it effectively renders Ruskin complicit with the actions he ignores: the atrocious historical truth of Turner's image is relegated to a casual comment in a ‘brief footnote’ in Ruskin's text, which, as Dabydeen ingeniously points out, seems ‘like an afterthought, something tossed overboard’ (Turner 7).