TURNER AND THE SLAVE TRADE

238pp., b/w & colour illus., hardback, d.w., Sam Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, 2025

ISBN: 9781913107512

An exploration of English painter and printmaker J. M. W. Turner's evolving response to slavery over his lifetime, from his financial investment in a Jamaican property worked by enslaved labourers to his later denunciation of the trade in his art, most notably in his iconic painting, The Slave Ship (1840).

Sam Smiles is Honorary Professor at the University of Exeter, and author of The Late Works of J. M. W. Turner: The artist and his critics (2020).