The composition has affinities with the landscapes of Richard Earlom’s
Liber Veritatis prints after Claude Lorrain (see general
Liber Studiorum introduction), nos.165 (
Sea Coast with Christ Calling SS Andrew and Peter)
3 and 184 (
Coast Scene with Perseus, known as ‘The Origin of Coral’).
4 Ruskin attacked the supposed way the ‘blundering, pseudo-picturesque, pseudo-classical minds of Claude and the Renaissance landscape painters ... appointed the type of “classical landscape” thenceforward to consist of a bay of insipid sea, and a rock with a hole through it.’ Nevertheless, he considered that ‘Turner gave the hackneyed composition a strange power and freshness’ in this composition,
5 and wrote to W.G. Rawlinson: ‘I love it as a bit of Greek shore itself.’
6 Turner would again associate a coastal arch with a classical subject in his later, unfinished painting
Rocky Bay with Figures (Tate
N01989).
7 A more contemporary source has been suggested for the present design:
8 Benjamin West’s Homeric subject
The First Interview of Telemachus with Calypso; although the original painting exhibited in 1773 is untraced and its apparently reversed engraving not published until 1824,
9 Turner may have known the version probably shown at the Royal Academy in 1801.
10 There are fundamental similarities, with male mythological characters and the sea to the left below a bright sky, and a female group on a wooded shore to the right.
