A new book by Sam Smiles, an emeritus art historian at the University of Plymouth, challenges a well-known tale about Romantic painting. Titled Turner and the Slave Trade, it urges readers to question the connection between one celebrated canvas and a notorious ship. The argument centers on J.M.W. Turner’s “The Slave Ship” (1840), which has long been read as a denunciation of slavery, and the book contends that the work may not refer to the Zong massacre at all.
Anyone who has placed Turner’s portrait above their mantelpiece or paid a visit to a gallery displaying his work will find themselves confronted with an uncomfortable question raised by the book. That question concerns whether the painter may have profited from the slave trade himself.
Turner’s Port Town
The writer begins with a family memory. His grandfather came from close to Black River, a Jamaican port town where the ship Zong called in 1781 after jettisoning 133 enslaved Africans overboard to collect an insurance claim. That river, running into the sea, stood as the artist’s picture’s central image.
But Smiles, who co-curated the Tate’s 2014 traveling exhibition Late Turner: Painting Set Free, argues that the association is a mistake. He writes that the painting is almost certainly not a reference to the Zong Massacre.
“The tableau of ‘The Slave Ship’ is almost certainly not a reference to the Zong Massacre.”
Smiles does not deny that the painting condemns slavery. What he disputes is the specific link to the Zong massacre, which generations have taught as its subject. That is a striking claim.
The Legs of the Slaves
The painting itself is easy to describe. It shows the limbs of Black people rendered as footnotes in British art history, with a woman’s shackled leg most prominent in the lower right quadrant, alongside fish and seagulls. The title at the Royal Academy in 1840 was “Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and the Dying–Typhoon Coming On.” It was considered absurd in its time and a condemnation of chattel slavery.
Though Smiles argues the painting does not show the Zong, it has come to stand for that event all the same. People can be forgiven for mixing them up, since the Thames flows a mile from the Royal Academy, where the work first appeared, and the author was born near its banks.
The Cattle Farm Investment
Smiles’s main argument concerns Turner’s own financial ties to slavery. He documents that in 1805, the painter invested £100 (~£11,200 or $14,800 today) in a consortium to fund a Jamaican cattle farm operated by an enslaved African workforce.
This finding comes from 2007, where the author puts forward a question about Turner’s reputation. He asks whether the painter can be excused for benefiting from Jamaican slavery. Given that Jamaicans have just petitioned King Charles for reparations in London on September 7, the question carries real weight.
Jamaica’s Petition
What stands out about the book is its timing. Jamaicans asked King Charles for reparations on September 7, and now the question of paying for wrongs committed during the colonial era has returned to public attention.
Smiles argues that there is no contradiction in Turner’s actions. Rather, he says that they show how chattel slavery was turned into something else, and how that system served as the engine that paid for England, particularly through absentee colonialism. The book ties into the global Black Lives Matter movement and the dangers of ongoing harm done by museums.
Before beginning his examination, he says he left out offensive terms and images that repeat the grammar of racism, except when they were absolutely needed for the argument. He listens to the warning of scholars like Saidiya Hartman to move with care through the colonial record.
What Remains Unclear
The book’s argument recasts Romanticism’s relationship to nature and landscape painting as a vehicle for colonial propaganda. It also asks readers to consider the painter’s legacy in a new light.
The portrait of Turner shows up on the British £20 note, which turns him into currency in the art world and beyond. Yet no one can say exactly what he stands for. The book sets out to correct a received story, though it also prompts questions about how we use art to understand the past.
The Comparison
| “The Slave Ship” (1840) | Turner’s 1805 investment | |
|---|---|---|
| What it depicts | Slavers throwing dead and dying overboard, typhoon coming on | A Jamaican cattle farm operated by enslaved labor |
| What it symbolizes | Condemnation of slavery | Sublimation of chattel slavery |
The volume serves as a reminder that art history remains open to fresh interpretation. The label attached to Turner’s painting has been read as a protest against slavery for generations, and that reading has shaped how we see the Romantic tradition. Smiles’s work might prove too narrow for the whole of it.
Whether Turner deserves forgiveness remains undecided. He made money from Jamaican slavery while also denouncing it in his writings. The book refuses to settle the moral balance between those two facts. Instead, it urges readers to examine the evidence once more and come to their own conclusions.
Source material: “Turning Turner’s Legacy,” Hyperallergic.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.