How opinions differ. Of this picture Ruskin wrote: 'I think the noblest sea that Turner has ever painted, and, if so, the noblest certainly ever painted by man, is that of "The Slave Ship," the chief Academy picture of the exhibition of 1840.' After a long and eloquent description of the sea, without mentioning the sharks, or the bodies, or the chains, he concludes: 'I believe, if I were reduced to rest Turner's immortality upon any single work, I should choose this.'
I will now quote George Innes, the American painter: 'Turner's "Slave Ship" is the most infernal piece of clap-trap ever painted. There is nothing in it. It has as much to do with human affections and thought as a ghost. It is not even a fine bouquet of colour. The colour is harsh, disagreeable and discordant.' Hamerton suggested that the opinion of George Innes owes part of its severity to reaction against Ruskin's eloquence.
Among the other pictures of this year were a 'Venice,' now at the South Kensington Museum, the middle distance crowded, the creamy towers beautiful; and the magnificent 'Rockets and Blue Lights,' a tempestuous nocturne, impressionism run riot, which fetched in the Yerkes sale at New York in 1910, £25,000, and which was hailed in the transatlantic newspapers as the finest example of Turner's genius ever seen in the United States. In this year, also, perhaps later, may be placed 'The Arch of Constantine, Rome,' that colour dream with the yellow sunset blazing behind the tree, and the arch looking like a rose red ruin of the imagination. Mr. Alfred Thornton, who has worked out minutely the actual topography of this picture, has come to the conclusion that Turner adhered very closely to the facts, obviously because the facts happened to coincide with his vision. Of the companion picture, 'Tivoli,' Mr. Thornton says: 'The artist seems to have recorded a series of impressions he might have gathered during an evening walk at Tivoli. Scarcely any two parts of the picture are side by side in nature, yet all can be identified with more or less certainty.'
Plate XXXI. The Arch of Constantine, Rome (1840) Tate Gallery
'The Burning of the Ships,' which is the same size as 'The Arch of Constantine' and 'Tivoli,' and probably arises, like them, out of his last visit to Rome, is sheer vision, sheer imagination, perhaps founded on some recollection of naval warfare, or a vague memory of an incident in the Iliad. It is a fantasy of colour and atmosphere. To look closely is to see clouds of smoke rising from distant ships, with suggestions of an arch and buildings, and galleys crowded with rowers; but Turner was beyond form and definition when he painted 'The Burning of the Ships'; he saw only the effect of the fire and the fury, lingering with much loveliness in light.
In 1840 or later he painted many of the water-colours that arrest us by their beauty in the new Turner Gallery, such as 'The Lake of Lucerne, from Fluelen,' the large, unfinished 'Lake with Distant Headlands and Palaces,' and that delight drawing in Mr. Rawlinson's collection called 'In the Vale D'Aosta, a Passing Shower.'