Turner's principal literary source was Thomas Beale's Natural History of the Sperm Whale, published in London in 1835 and in an expanded edition in 1839. Elhanan Bicknell, the first owner of the MMA painting, had made his fortune as a director of Langton and Bicknell, oil merchants of Newington Butts, whose financial interest was in ships of the Pacific sperm-whale fishery. He subscribed for four copies of Beale's book, and may have given or lent one to Turner, whose patron he already was. The artist subtitled his 1845 exhibits Vide Beale's Voyage, referring to page 163 for the Tate's picture and page 175 for the MMA work. For his depiction of the whale, which is clearly visible only in this canvas, Turner consulted wood engravings by William James Linton and after William Huggins that illustrate Beale's book. Bicknell's firm also owned a canvas by Huggins (private collection, United Kingdom), painted about 1835, that Turner must have used as a source for details in this picture and its companion.

There are related watercolors on nine pages of Turner’s undated Whalers Sketchbook in the Tate  and a separate sheet with a whaling subject is at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. While the watercolors are as evocative as the painting, none is closely related in thematic material, and all may in any event be later. In the 1840s, few people in England knew what a sperm whale looked like. Turner may never have seen one and, using the descriptions and illustrations that were available to him, he created these works in part from his imagination, bringing to bear many years' observation of the seas in the Channel and elsewhere along the English coast.

In April 1850, a few months after returning to New York from his first visit to London, Herman Melville ordered a copy of Beale's Natural History of the Sperm Whale. On the title page, Melville wrote, "Turner’s pictures of whalers were suggested by this book", thus documenting that he knew of Turner's paintings, even though he may never have seen them, and that he drew on Beale, as well as his own experience as a sailor and harpooner, when writing Moby-Dick, published in 1851. As Wallace (1985) has suggested, Melville may have had Whalers in mind while describing a picture hanging in the Spouter-Inn in chapter three of Moby-Dick.

The painting, acquired by the Museum in 1896, was relined and cleaned in 1933, and treated again in 1968. The surface is flattened. The ship is considerably abraded, but some of the rigging can still be read. The best-preserved passages are the small boats and figures, the head of the whale, and the dark, choppy surrounding sea. Turner changed the contours of the whale's nose, gradually widening and enlarging the shape. Examination under the microscope reveals the remnants of scumbles associated with the darkest gray pigment that may originally have subdued the contrast between this pigment and the surrounding areas.

 

Editor's Note: For more about whalers in nonfiction read Nathan Philbrick's Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex which has just been made into a movie by Ron Howard.