“Hurrah for the whaler Erebus! Another fish!” That’s the cry that comes from a crowd of ecstatic men in boats on a mirror-still sea, captured in Turner’s 1846 masterpiece that takes its title from their exclamation. You look for the fish and see the huge grey head of a whale suspended against yellow light, under the partly furled sails of a ghostly vessel. But something is wrong. The hysterical celebration is desperate. The water is becalmed, the air frozen and dead. These whalers are trapped in pack ice, still slaughtering their prey when they may never escape their remote prison.
Dark Waters is an exhibition of nautical ghost stories, a collection of sinister shanties and tales told by old salts in dockside pubs. Turner owned such a pub: it’s still going, as Turner’s Old Star in the Wapping area of London. Maybe that’s where he met whaling veterans and heard their icy adventures. In this show, that sense of a journey into Davy Jones’s Locker is heightened by an atmospheric soundscape, composed by Lamin Fofana whose splashes and moans create a very modern elegy for those in peril on the sea. I don’t generally think paintings need a soundtrack – but this one puts you in the right, sombre mood.
