Whalers

Turner painted Whalers around 1845, one of four whaling scenes he produced in the final decade of his life. He was 70 years old and painting with a freedom that baffled his contemporaries. The pictures were commissioned by Elhanan Bicknell, a whale oil merchant who had made his fortune in the Arctic fishery, and they were meant to hang in his London home. The painting shows a whaling ship in Arctic waters, with two whaleboats launched in pursuit of a whale. The ship is barely visible through the mist and spray, its sails reduced to pale shapes against the sky. The whaleboats are small dark forms in the foreground, their crews reduced to dots of paint. The whale itself is a dark shape rising from the water at the right, half-hidden by waves. The sea and sky merge into a single field of gray, blue, and white, with the horizon line barely distinguishable. Turner had not been to the Arctic. He painted the whaling scenes from written accounts, from prints, and from his own knowledge of the North Sea. The paintings are less about whaling than about the limits of human vision: how far can you see into a storm, and at what point does a ship become indistinguishable from the water it floats on? The whaling subject gave Turner a reason to paint water, mist, and light at the edge of legibility, which is what interested him by 1845. The four whaling paintings were exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1845 and 1846. The critics were baffled. The Times called them 'pictures of nothing,' a phrase that has followed Turner's late work ever since. John Ruskin, Turner's greatest defender, wrote that the whaling pictures were 'the most perfectly characteristic of all his works' but admitted that most viewers could not read them. Bicknell returned two of the four paintings, claiming they were unfinished. Oil on canvas, 91 by 122 centimeters. Turner painted the sea and sky in thin washes of cobalt blue, gray, and white, layering them wet-on-wet to create the effect of mist. The ship and boats are painted in dark browns and blacks, applied with a palette knife in some areas and a brush in others. The surface is rough and uneven, with areas of bare canvas showing through in the sky. The horizontal format and cool palette make this print work well in a study, office, or room with gray or blue walls. The grays and blues pair with cool-toned interiors and modern furniture. The 18x24 size is the best choice, as the composition needs width to read. The painting has a turbulent, atmospheric quality that suits rooms with a serious mood. The painting entered the Met's collection in 1896, purchased with the Wolfe Fund. It was one of the first Turner paintings to enter an American museum. This is a public domain artwork (CC0), scanned from the original at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.