“Turner’s Whaling Pictures”

Near the end of his life, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) created a quartet of marine paintings centered around the theme of whaling, a major industry for 19th-century Britain as well as for America. The subject was custom-made for Turner, who often turned to the sea in his attempts to capture the awe-inspiring power of nature, depicted here in near-abstract fury that confounded critics of the day. The pitting of man against whale added a frisson of life-and-death struggle to these canvases, which Herman Melville may have seen during a sojourn in London—thus, possibly playing a role in inspiring Melville's magisterial epic, Moby-Dick. The four painting—one belonging to the Met, the other three to Britain’s Tate Gallery—are brought together in this show for the first time.