ABSTRACT
The realistic image of a ship was essentially imported into England via Dutch painting in the seventeenth century. Stylised billowing-sail galleons of the Breughel sort that Auden noted or formal drawings of hull and rigging gave way to 'real' ships tacking, shortening sail, being loaded and unloaded, careened, masted, dismasted. The steam tug, itself dark and portentous, reminded the viewer of both looming modernity and the dehumanised moral mechanism of Turner's next painting, 'Slave Ship: Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On', which so impressed Ruskin, the author of Modern Painters, that he bought it. A technical/sociological basis for this 'humanisation' or 'composure' of the ship appeared in Karl Marx's remarkable 'The Working Day' section of Capital. Here he compared the 'subjective' ordering of the putting-out system in the textile industry, where process had to be adapted to individual capabilities, with the 'objective' ordering of a machine-based process, into which individuals were slotted.
