Whalers

Turner was 70 when he painted this, near the end of a long career, and his ships and seas had dissolved into light and vapour to the point where many viewers no longer knew what they were looking at. He had a specific buyer in mind, Elhanan Bicknell, a collector who had made a fortune in whale oil, and he even worked the subject up from a real book, Thomas Beale's natural history of the sperm whale. The gamble did not pay off. Bicknell returned the picture to him. It is one of four whaling scenes Turner made in these years, an old man watching a violent industry, the whale itself barely there, more a disturbance in the haze than a beast.