J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

This richly-coloured study is described by Butlin and Joll as Turner’s ‘first idea’ for Dido and Aeneas exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1814 (Tate N00494),1 although it is itself based on a preliminary outline sketch on folio 17 of the sketchbook (D05513). Here, the main elements of the composition are already in place: Dido’s dawn hunting party, the harbour and buildings of Carthage and specific features including the bridge in the right foreground and the round buildings in the middle distance at left and at upper right. However, as Wilton remarks, the architectural detailing differs from the picture, the round temple at left here becoming a fortified tower and the bridge being transformed from a rustic structure to a grander Neoclassical one.2 Nicholson, in her discussion of Turner’s response to the Aeneid,3 observes that Turner’s interpretation of this subject was ‘as much [John] Dryden’s as Virgil’s’ and the ‘4^th Book of Dryden’s Aeneis’ was Turner’s source for the quotation attached to his picture in the 1814 Academy catalogue: ‘The Queen, Aeneas, and the Tyrian Court | Shall to the shady woods for sylvan games resort’.