When I first saw JMW Turner’s Wreckers—Coast of Northumberland at the Yale Center for British Art, I took it for a classic Turner seascape: churning waves bathed in the characteristic golden glow, a dark storm looming in the distance. But on closer inspection, I was moved by what I saw on the human scale: a moment of grace.
The picture depicts the northern coast of Scotland. In the foreground, the titular “wreckers” drag the remnants of a boat to shore. Wreckers were gangs who lured ships ashore with false lights near dangerous rocks in order to scavenge the shipwrecks.
Surprisingly, Wreckers does not appear to pass judgment on these crimes. About twenty figures populate the painting, but they take up only a few inches of canvas. Half are darkened, while the other half are illuminated. There even seems to be a mother among them, holding her child. The delicate detail with which Turner painted the gang, inconsistent with his characteristic blur of light and color, feels like a form of forgiveness. The wreckers’ miniature scale seems small and insignificant against the backdrop of the sea.
Indeed, in Wreckers all human effort appears futile in the face of nature’s destruction. Turner’s furious diagonal strokes imbue the waves with a sense of unrelenting violence. The clouds above the ocean mirror the water’s menacing quality, appearing like a massive dark wave about to break. A steamboat tugs a ship in the background, but they’re painted as fragile spires rocking about in the waves. The taxied ship lists precariously, as if about to capsize.
I have a tendency to rage against perceived injustices in the world. Wreckers relieves me of some of that anger — by dwarfing man’s actions with elemental forces, it serves its own kind of reckoning.
Annie Yi 