The story of how the painting of an
atrocity came to belong to William Sturgis Hooper Lothrop, the ambitious young
man who traveled to Puerto Rico in a steamship transporting postal employees in 1898, adds
threads to the thick fabric of images, stories, decrees, people and other goods
circulating between the United States, Europe and the Caribbean.
Shortly before the abolition of slavery in
Puerto Rico, the painting –the visual commemoration of a massacre transformed
into a seascape– began its voyage to the oceans of America. The Bostonian
Charles Eliot Norton was the intermediary between the unique sensibility of its
first owner, the critic John Ruskin, and the establishment of a chair of Aesthetics
at Harvard University. Norton founded the chair in 1874, when the riches
accumulated by the merchants and bankers of Boston aspired to an upgrade in the
scale of refinement. It was no longer enough to count coins, pay tithes to the
church, and contribute to the restoration of stained glass windows and to the
founding of poor houses and orphanages. There was no reason to live in comfort
without luxuries, or to be simply content with exclusive access to a university
for the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the first families,
organized in a hierarchy that began with the Adams, Cabots and Lowells and
ended, perhaps, with a dull intellectual like William´s father. Man lives to
die in peace with his conscience, but life does not have to turn its back to
beauty.
In a Europe destroyed and rebuilt by the
proliferation of factories and machines the impoverished nobility auctioned
their assets at good prices. American heiresses, not well priced in the past,
began to be valued more for their fortunes than for their rough manners and
ways of walking, acquired in climbing the slope of Beacon Street on foot to go
shopping and avoid the temptation to nap. They were frank, they laughed without
restraining the vulgarity of their laughter, their cheeks seemed too rough
because of the contact of sea airs.
The desire to adorn capital with beauty coincided with
Norton's first trips to Europe. The fate of the painting owes something to
Norton´s high regard for Ruskin; to the fact that the critic introduced him to
the work of John Mallard Taylor Turner; to their friendship coinciding in time with
the personality of a millionaire Yankee collector. Those intimate relationships
tipped the balance of cultural relations. It was Norton who made it possible
for Slave Ship to begin its journey from north to north. He saw it for the
first time in the critic's house, where it seemed to be consumed with brightness
in the gray surroundings. Ruskin's personality, nervous, almost hysterical,
tortured by desires that his sensibility was incapable of assimilating and
excusing with benevolence, was submerged in the cult of a frightful scene,
misplaced in that piece of cloth, the source of a haunting light.
