The New Yorker | The Art World: Turner and Extremes ...

Poor old Turner: one minute the critics were singing his praises, the next they were berating him for being senile or infantile, or both. No great painter suffered as much from excesses of adulation and execration, sometimes for the same painting. “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhon Coming On” had, on its appearance at the Royal Academy, in 1840, been mocked by the reviewers as “the contents of a spittoon,” a “gross outrage to nature,” and so on.

The critic of the Times thought the seven pictures—including “Slavers”—that Turner sent to the Royal Academy that year were such “detestable absurdities” that “it is surprising the [selection] committee have suffered their walls to be disgraced with the dotage of his experiments.” John Ruskin, who had been given “Slavers” by his father and had appointed himself Turner’s paladin, not only went overboard in praise of his hero but drowned in the ocean of his own hyperbole. In the first edition of “Modern Painters” (1843), Ruskin, then all of twenty-four, sternly informed the hacks that “their duty is not to pronounce opinions upon the work of a man who has walked with nature threescore years; but to impress upon the public the respect with which they [the works] are to be received.”

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