A blood-red and golden sunset burns across a violent sea, and a slave ship, her sails reduced against a coming typhoon, stands in the hazy distance at the left. In the lower foreground the waves are full of drowning figures, a shackled leg and swarming fish. J. M.

W. Turner showed it at the Royal Academy in 1840, the year the World Anti-Slavery Convention met in London, with lines from his own poem Fallacies of Hope. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston says it was likely inspired by the notorious 1781 incident in which the crew of the slave ship Zong forced 133 captives overboard to drown so that insurance money could be collected for those "lost at sea." The critic John Ruskin once owned the painting and wrote that, if he were reduced to resting Turner's immortality on a single work, he would choose this one.

It is now so fragile that the museum did not lend it to the Tate Britain or Kimbell Art Museum venues of the 2022 exhibition Turner's Modern World. It is in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.