Jason Edwards - Turner and the Whale

About the authors

Meg Boulton is a freelance lecturer of Art History and a research affiliate at the University of York, whose wider research addresses the conceptualisation and representation of space, with interests crossing the Medieval to the post-modern.

Martha Cattell is a collaborative PhD student with the History of Art Department, University of York, and the Hull Maritime Museum, whose work explores the visual and material cultures of the 19th-century whaling industry.

Jason Edwards is a Professor of Art History at the University of York, who works on the global contexts of British art history across the long nineteenth century, and at the intersections of queer and vegan theory.

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First published in Great Britain in 2017

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Front cover image: Whalers (Boiling Blubber) Entangled in Flaw Ice, Endeavouring to Extricate Themselves (c.1846), oil on canvas, 89.9. x 120 cm. Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest, 1856. Tate, London (N000547)

Contents

Jason Edwards

Martha Cattell

Jason Edwards

Martha Cattell

Meg Boulton

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the Collaborative Doctoral Award that enabled much of the research underpinning this project, and to the staff at the Hull Maritime Museum, especially Robin Diaper, for his ongoing enthusiasm, expertise and support.

We are thankful to our colleagues in York Art History Collaborations and the British Art Research School in the History of Art department at the University of York, and especially the Schools director, Richard Johns, the co-curator, with Christine Riding, of the 201314 Turner and the Sea exhibition.

We are indebted to everyone at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Yale Center for British Art, and the New Bedford Whaling Museum, for their enthusiastic reception of this project, and for their generous doctoral research fellowships, which enabled much of the research underpinning this project.

We are also grateful to our colleagues at Tate Britain, especially Amy Concannon, for giving us access to crucial works by Turner.

We are thankful to our colleagues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for their Turners Whaling Pictures exhibition, and to Robert K. Wallace, to whom all scholars in this field are indebted.

Finally, we would like to thank the Heritage Lottery Fund without whose funding this project would not be possible.

We dedicate our work to the billions of fish, birds and mammals needlessly killed each year for human food.

Martha Cattell and Jason Edwards

University of York, Winter 201617

Chapter 1

Introduction: Turner and the Whale

Jason Edwards

HULL, CAPITAL OF WHALING CULTURE

Hulls museums and their collections have long been on the map for those interested in the history of whaling. In A Bower in the Arsacides, Chapter 102 of Herman Melvilles seminal whaling novel Moby-Dick (1851), the narrator describes a Leviathanic Museum in Hull, one of the whaling ports of that country, where they have some fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales.

The public display of Hulls maritime collections got a significant boost in 1912 when the Museum of Fisheries and Shipping, the successor, in many ways, to the earlier Literary and Philosophical Society Museum, opened in Pickering Park. By the 1970s, however, the collections had outgrown even these premises, and the old Dock Office in the city centre became available as a new home for them in 1975, when the building was renamed the Hull Maritime Museum, although it is still fondly recalled by some residents as the Town Docks Museum.

The former Dock Office, a recognisable landmark in the city, with its distinctive triangular shape and three iconic domes, was designed by Christopher G. Wray, and built between 1868 and 1871, at the time Hulls whaling industry was drawing to a close. It was originally home to the Hull Dock Company, which managed the citys port operations, and the building is decorated with maritime motifs, including anchors, fishing nets, and tridents, making it the ideal architectural frame for the new museum and this exhibition. In addition, as the former Dock Office, the building, like the exhibition and permanent collections it now houses, is a symbol of Hulls significant maritime history; a reminder of the period during which ships sailed up to the museums doors and passed through the city centre for everyone to see.

The Hull Maritime Museum is one of the most significant repositories of maritime objects in the UK outside of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. The museum houses collections relating to the fishing trade, docks and docking, merchant shipping, ship building, navigation, inland waterways, general maritime history, and whaling. It includes a large archive of photographs, prints and books, a sizeable collection of marine art, and one of the largest collections of scrimshaw carving on whale and walrus bone anywhere outside of the United States.

The collections are divided into three main categories whaling, fishing and the merchant trade and concentrate on Hulls maritime activities from the late eighteenth century to the present. The permanent displays relating to whaling cover the entire ground floor and include a range of journals, maps, logbooks, try-works, harpoons and other whaling tools; numerous canvases from the local Hull School of painters; as well as the scrimshaw, and collections of Inuit visual and material culture.

TURNER AND THE WHALE

Turner and the Whale brings to the museum and to Hull, the capital of the nineteenth-century British whaling industry, for the first time from Tate Britain, home of the Turner Bequest of more than 30,000 images, Turners three late whaling oils: