“I think,” says the “Graduate of Oxford”--Ruskin--in his _Modern
Painters_, “the noblest sea that Turner has ever painted, and, if so,
the noblest certainly ever painted by man, is that of the Slave Ship,
the chief Academy picture of the Exhibition of 1840. It is a sunset on
the Atlantic, after prolonged storm; but the storm is partially lulled,
and the torn and streaming rain-clouds are moving in scarlet lines to
lose themselves in the hollow of the night. The whole surface of sea
included in the picture is divided into two ridges of enormous swell,
not high nor local, but a low broad heaving of the whole ocean, like the
lifting of its bosom by a deep-drawn breath after the torture of the
storm. Between these two ridges, the fire of the sunset falls along the
trough of the sea, dyeing it with an awful but glorious light,--the
intense and lurid splendour which burns like gold, and bathes like
blood. Along this fiery path and valley, the tossing waves by which the
swell of the sea is recklessly divided, lift themselves in dark,
indefinite, fantastic forms, each casting a faint and ghastly shadow
behind it along the illumined foam. They do not rise everywhere, but
three or four together, in wild groups, fitfully and furiously, as the
under strength of the swell compels or permits them; leaving between
them treacherous spaces of level and whirling water, now lighted with
green and lamp-like fire, now flashing back the gold of the declining
sun, now fearfully dyed from above with the indistinguishable images of
the burning clouds, which fall upon them in flakes of crimson and
scarlet, and give to the reckless waves the added motion of their own
fiery flying. Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers,
are cast upon the mist of the night, which gathers cold and low,
advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty ship as it labours
amidst the lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky in
lines of blood, girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs
the sky with horror, and mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight; and
cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines
the multitudinous sea.”