No encounter with this painting can be pleasant. Its details are terrible and its full title directs our looking, telling us to focus first on the grisly foreground and the on the toiling weather in the background...
I reallize that I am troubled by the title Slave Ship. It's the word "slave": a word which still strikes the ear like a lash. There are those who enlsave others and there are those who are enlslaved by others. But there's no one whose essence or true description is "slave." A person can be enslaved, can be trapped in the death-in-life known as slavery, but that is not who they are. It is something intolerable that is happening to them or that happened to them...
In Turner's painting the sky is a riot of reds and yellows, stippled with orange, pink, purple, blue, and white.The painting depicts a sunset in a tempest though it's unlikely that the mass murder on the real Zong took place during a tempest. The sky in Turner's painting looks as though it is on fire. His escapes often depict a natural world in a state of wildness beyond human control.The oncoming typhoon as imagined by Turner in this painting will compound the miseries of those in the water.The lurid colors of this sky are not denotative, they are simply atmospheric effects of the kind Tuner frequently employed...