Royal Academy

The Royal Academy is identified as the exhibition venue for four of J. M. W. Turner’s whaling scenes in 1845 and 1846. In the account, its significance lies in bringing images of the whale hunt into public view—and in the printed link between those images and Thomas Beale’s writing, a link later noted by Herman Melville.

Whaling Scenes on Exhibition

Turner exhibited four scenes of whaling at the Royal Academy across 1845 and 1846. Their treatment made the hunt appear heroic, rendered in luminous, nearly abstract forms, while the whales themselves remained little more than ghostly suggestions. The contrast is striking: the violence and scale of the subject are present, yet the animal is barely defined within the images.

The Catalogue Link to Thomas Beale

The exhibition catalogue attributed the scenes with the reference “Whalers. Vide Beale’s Voyage p. 175”. That credit connects Turner’s paintings to a published account of whaling rather than presenting them as images detached from written testimony. It also records how whale-hunting knowledge could move between prose and art, with the animal’s difficult-to-see body remaining at the edge of both forms of representation.

Herman Melville’s Annotation

Herman Melville may have heard of Turner’s well-known pictures during his visit to London. Later, in New York, he bought a copy of Thomas Beale’s work for three dollars and thirty-eight cents and wrote on its title page, “Turner’s pictures of whalers were suggested by this book”. The inscription preserves Melville’s reading of the connection indicated by the catalogue: Beale’s account informed Turner’s whaling imagery. The Royal Academy exhibitions thus sit within a wider chain linking written observation, painted scenes, and Melville’s attention to both.