Painting the Apocalypse

J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) pushed Romantic landscape painting to its extremes. His late works dissolve recognizable subjects into swirling vortexes of light and color — storms, fires, and sunsets painted with such intensity that contemporaries accused him of madness. He was actually painting the future of abstraction decades early.

His haunting The Slave Ship (1840) depicts bodies thrown overboard into a sea of churning blood-red and gold. The painting fuses sublime beauty with moral horror in a way no previous painter had attempted. Turner exhibited it to coincide with a major anti-slavery convention in London, turning a seascape into a public argument for abolition.