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Artist J.M.W. Turner, RA 1775 - 1851. Perhaps the most famous English Romantic landscape artist. He became known
as 'the painter of light'.
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The Arch of Titus, Rome
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| This picture is described in the Official Catalogue of the National
as “Rome—the Arch of Titus and the Campo Vaccino. A religious procession in the foreground.’ We have in other engravings the decay of
ancient civilizations with their pomp and glory. Sometimes, as in the Ancient and Modern Italy’s, he would paint two pictures to
enforce the contrast between past and present. In one of these he emphasizes the splendour of the Empire, its power, its luxury, and
cruelty; in the other the splendour of the natural site, and the disregard of the ancient glory of the race shown by the de2enerate
descendants who pass unmoved amongst its ruins and are absorbed in pleasure and superstition. Sometimes he paints a picture of pure
exultation, like that of the “Rise of Carthage,” or “Dido and AEneas preparing for the Chase;” but he points his sad moral by
painting the “Decline of Carthage’ as a companion-picture to the former, and the sudden and terrible
termination to the love of Dido and AEneas is too well known to need another picture to tell us thereof; “Fallacies of Hope,” “Sic
transit gloria mundi,” “The old order giving place to new,” “The serpent in the grass “—Turner’s pictures, as a whole, are only these
sad mottoes written large in his own painter’s poetry. |
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