Elisabeth Schneider: On "The Yachts"
No reader of Modern Painters is likely to forget the description and the accompanying illustration of the painting that Ruskin considered J. M. W. Turner's greatest (hence, in Ruskin's view, perhaps the greatest of all paintings), that called "The Slave Ship." Though my own reading of Modern Painters preceded my first encounter with William Carlos Williams' poetry by some dozen or more years, still "The Yachts" on a first reading at once recalled the picture and the passage in Ruskin.