AFA Winter 2019

Winter 68 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), Whalers (Boiling Blubber) Entangled in Flaw Ice, Endeavoring to Extricate Themselves, exhibited 1846. Oil paint on canvas, 899 x 1200 mm, frame: 1288 x 1593 x 160 mm. Tate: Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856 © Tate, 2019. The watercolor is from a sketchbook of the early 1840s, and may document a rare occasion when a whale was spotted in the Thames estuary. The violence of the moment is made clear with the dramatic red gash of paint across the whale’s body. Turner has scrawled in pencil, “I shall use this.” The other work is the fourth and final oil painting in Turner’s whaling series, created 1844–1846, perhaps to entice the whaling magnate Elhanan Bicknell (who only purchased one of the series, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). In this scene two whale ships process their kill, while also threatened by sea ice. Both works relate closely to Mystic Seaport Museum’s history of engaging closely with the history of whaling. The museum’s iconic vessel, the Charles W. Morgan (the oldest commercial vessel afloat in the world) was searching for whales in the Pacific on her second voyage when this painting was exhibited in 1846. J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), A Harpooned Whale, 1845. Graphite and watercolor on paper, 238 x 336 mm. Tate: Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856 © Tate, 2019.