Dido Building Carthage: Turner's 1815 Harbour and His Claude Challenge

The subject

Dido, founder and queen of Carthage, stands among her architects on the left bank while the city rises around a broad harbour. The tomb of her murdered husband Sychaeus occupies the right. Between them the water runs straight back to a sun sitting just above the horizon, and the whole structure of the painting hangs on that light.

Catalogue record — Holding institution

Artist	Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851)
Date	1815
Exhibited	Royal Academy, 1815
Medium	Oil paint on canvas
Dimensions	1555 x 2318 mm
Collection	The National Gallery, London
Accession number	NG498

The moment chosen is a beginning, not a triumph. Carthage is under construction, and a nineteenth-century viewer knew how the story finished, with the city destroyed by Rome. Turner painted the decline himself the following year, and the pair were meant to be read together as a rise and a fall.

The Claude comparison

Everything about the composition points at Claude Lorrain. The classical harbour, the framing masses at the sides, the carefully stepped recession and above all the low sun on water are Claude's devices, used deliberately and without disguise. Turner was not borrowing quietly; he was inviting the comparison in front of an audience that would recognise every element.

His will made the invitation permanent. He left this painting and Sun Rising through Vapour to the nation on condition that they hang beside two named Claudes in the National Gallery. The condition is still honoured, and all four can be seen together, which makes it the only such arrangement in the collection.

What Turner thought of it

He rated it very highly. Reports have him calling it his masterpiece, and at one stage he is said to have wanted to be buried wrapped in it, a wish his friends talked him out of. Whatever the exact truth of those stories, the terms of the bequest confirm that he regarded it as the picture to be judged on.

The handling

The paint is more controlled than in the work Turner is now best known for. Architecture is described rather than dissolved, the figures are properly drawn, and the recession is managed in clear stages. This is Turner meeting the academic standard on its own ground, which was precisely the point of the exercise.

The light is where he departs. Claude places a sun that illuminates a stable scene, while Turner's sits lower and burns harder, flattening the middle distance into glare and bleaching the colour straight out of the water. The classical apparatus holds together, but the effect straining against it is already his own.

The pair with Carthaginian decline

Turner exhibited The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire the year after this canvas, and the two were conceived as a matched sequence. Rise and fall is the oldest structure available for a painting about empire, and he used it at a moment when Britain had just finished twenty years of war and was contemplating its own position.

Reading the pair as a comment on Britain is tempting and was probably intended, though Turner left it unstated. He had a lifelong habit of choosing subjects whose application a contemporary audience could supply for itself, and his catalogue verses about the fallacies of hope pointed the moral without naming a modern target.

Where to see it

The painting is in the National Gallery in London. Because of the terms of the Bequest it hangs in company with the Claudes Turner named, so the comparison he set up can be made directly rather than from reproductions, which is unusual and worth the detour for anyone interested in how he understood his own work.