Sam Smiles Reconsiders Turner's Slavery Ties in New Book

A 1805 investment of £100 — roughly £11,200 or $14,800 in today's money — bound J.M.W. Turner to a Jamaican cattle farm worked by enslaved Africans, art historian Sam Smiles argues in Turner and the Slave Trade (2026), published this year.

What does the book argue?

Smiles, emeritus professor at the University of Plymouth, treats the 1840 painting "The Slave Ship" as a record of Turner's shifting moral conscience rather than a direct depiction of the 1781 Zong massacre. In that atrocity, the crew of the Zong threw 133 enslaved Africans overboard to claim insurance, an event that has long shaped readings of the canvas.

The painting debuted at the Royal Academy under its original title: "Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and the Dying — Typhoon Coming On." Critics of the day dismissed the work as absurd. It now stands as a condemnation of chattel slavery.

Can Turner be forgiven for profiting from slavery?

Smiles uncovered the £100 Jamaican stake in 2007, a discovery that overturned the painter's reputation as a detached Romantic observer. The investment funded a cattle operation staffed by enslaved laborers. Smiles concludes there is no contradiction between that financial position and the painter's anti-slavery imagery. He reads both as products of English absentee colonialism, in which slavery financed the empire from a distance.

The argument carries fresh political weight. On September 7, 2026, Jamaican advocates petitioned King Charles in London for reparations. Turner's face now appears on the British £20 note, a fact that makes the question of what his image should signify more urgent.

How does Smiles handle the archive?

Smiles states he omitted gratuitous images and offensive terms that reproduce "the violent grammar of racism," except where analysis required otherwise. The methodology echoes Saidiya Hartman's well-known caution against replicating harm in the colonial archive. Smiles also engages with the Black Lives Matter movement and ongoing concerns about epistemic violence inside museums.

The painting remains central to those debates. A woman's shackled leg dominates its lower right quadrant, rendered alongside fish and seagulls.

Where does the debate go next?

Scholar Paul Gilroy turned to "The Slave Ship" in The Black Atlantic (1993), a citation that cemented the work's place in Black Atlantic studies. Smiles' reassessment now challenges that lineage.

Smiles co-curated Tate's 2014 traveling exhibition Late Turner: Painting Set Free. Tate Britain still awards the annual Turner Prize in the painter's name. Whether the institution, and the wider reading public, will follow Smiles in treating "The Slave Ship" as ethical evidence rather than atrocity illustration remains the open question.