J.M.W. Turner’s 1840 painting "Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On)" depicts the callous cruelty of the slave trade. (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

NEW HAVEN – How much is too much Turner? New England’s determined to put it to the test. The past few years have seen no less ...

Matt Cosby for The New York Times And here alone, the London pictures have been joined by a Turner too fragile and valuable to travel: the M.F.A.’s grand and gruesome “Slave Ship (Slavers ...

Nature has inspired artists for generations. The term art has always conjured visions of beautiful landscapes and natural ...

Turner was quite thoroughly aware of the social and political conditions of his time. The most famous and certainly one of the most powerful paintings in the show, MFA’s “The Slave Ship ...

Count, and it adds up. There’s John Singleton Copley, with “Watson and the Shark,” 1778, a beloved piece from the MFA collection, and J.M.W. Turner’s “Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing ...

Detail of The Slave Ship by J.M.W. Turner. (Barney Burstein / Corbis / VCG via Getty Images) In the middle of 1856, the soon-to-be-celebrated poet Walt Whitman visited an impounded slave ship in ...

In 1840, at the age of 64, Turner painted Slave Ship, which received nothing but condemnation from the critics. Not only did they hate the loose brushwork and violent palette but found the scene’s ...