A Painting and A Slave Ship: Ruskin’s Visual Narrative On Turner

Abstract

Thanks to his technique of ‘word painting’ and employing words to replicate what viewing a painting feels like, John Ruskin is actively engaged in associations between word and image. Ruskin admired Joseph Mallord Turner’s works as the painter also used his own poetry as subsidiary to his paintings. The fact that both artists are inspired by sister arts, poetry and painting has been long debated. Yet as Turner tried to syncretize his painting with poetry and Ruskin tried to render visual proses, they still remained aware of both the union and the gap between words and images. What Turner did with his visual narratives is communicating on a level that required spectators’ commitment and engagement. For that reason, Ruskin’s defense and advocacy of William Turner in Modern Painters through Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On (1840), or The Slave Ship, suggests a special example in relating both artists to each other as much visually as poetically and verbally. Further to that how Turner’s highly abstract composition that initially met with a great deal of negative reaction, came to function as a medium for reflection of greater depth on the horrors of slavery with a historical particularity could be discovered through revisiting Ruskin’s sublime, ekphrastic elaborations.