Detail of Whalers by Turner in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 2010

Title: Whalers

Artist: Joseph Mallord William Turner (British, London 1775–1851 London)

Date: ca. 1845

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 36 1/8 x 48 1/4 in. (91.8 x 122.6 cm)

Classification: Paintings

Credit Line: Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund, 1896

Accession Number: 96.29

Turner was seventy years old when Whalers debuted to mixed reviews at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1845. Its subject proved elusive, as the English novelist William Thackeray observed: "That is not a smear of purple you see yonder, but a beautiful whale, whose tail has just slapped a half-dozen whale-boats into perdition; and as for what you fancied to be a few zig-zag lines spattered on the canvas at hap-hazard, look! they turn out to be a ship with all her sails." Apparently Turner undertook the painting—which was returned to him—for the collector Elhanan Bicknell, who had made his fortune in the whale-oil business.

Text from: www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437854