Turner was a great admirer of Richard Wilson: the first British painter to combine a close attention to nature with lessons learnt from the seventeenth-century masters, Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, and Gaspard Dughet. This painting is based on a picture by Wilson that exists in a number of versions. Turner’s work omits some features that appear in the Wilson, making Turner’s copy more of a direct representation of the view, though he does retain the large rocks that seem to have been introduced into the foreground by Wilson.