Whalers by J.M.W. Turner
J.M.W. Turner's 1845 oil painting "Whalers" hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it takes a clear moral side in the hunt by making the whaling ship a ghost. The vessel is dematerialized into atmospheric haze while the whale's massive, wounded head is rendered with hard, dark weight. The painting was made for collector Elhanan Bicknell at the height of the industrial whale-oil economy, but it reads as an indictment of that same industry.
Look at what Turner makes solid and what he dissolves. The three-masted ship is barely distinct from the sky. The whale's head on the left is a mountain of dark flesh. The small launch in the foreground is tossed in the foam, but the real visual drama is the faint crimson wash bleeding into the white spray around the animal. The sea itself is turning the color of the kill.
Turner was England's greatest painter of the sublime, and by 1845 he was pushing his late style to its limit. His works were becoming so dissolved into light and vapor that critics complained he was making paintings of nothing. Here he uses that technique to make a moral argument: human industry is provisional, the animal is real, and the sun overhead witnesses it all without intervening.
What do you notice first when you look at this painting: the ghostly ship, or the whale's massive head?
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Transcript
This is not a painting about a ship. The whaling vessel is already dissolving into light. Turner painted this in 1845, at the peak of the whaling industry. He hoped a collector named Elhanan Bicknell would buy it. But the men in this tiny launch are not the focus either. Look at what is actually solid in this picture. The whale's head. Dark muscle and bone. The only thing Turner did not dissolve. At the center: a vortex of light that erases the crime scene.