Here, a kneeling woman and companion at upper right and figures with hunting dogs at lower left anticipate the picture. At upper left of centre are the beginnings of a sketch of a rearing horse which is developed further, with surrounding figures, on folios 5 and especially 6 verso and 7. Assuming the connection with
Dido and Aeneas the motif must be related to the horses which in the picture cross a bridge in the right foreground. Turner painted them as ‘
equi effrenati ... without bridles’, and when told by Henry Scott Trimmer that ‘the Libyan horses had no bridles ... said he knew it’.
2 The rearing posture of the horses in these drawings and efforts of some of the figures to control them would fit this belief. However, in keeping with its Neoclassical poise, the horses in the picture cross the bridge in an orderly column and instead Turner seems to have used the rearing horse from his drawings in another context, in the centre of
The Destruction of Sodom (Tate
N00474).
3 This connection has not been noticed before and might support the date of ‘about 1805’ first suggested for
Sodom by Walter Thornbury, while not necessarily confirming the possibility floated by Butlin and Joll (without evidence as they admit) that it was shown in Turner’s Gallery that year.