The Blue Rigi, Sunrise
Tate, London
Dido building Carthage, J. M. W. Turner, 1815. Oil on canvas, 155.5 × 231.8 cm. The National Gallery, London. Public domain.
The image on this page is a studio placeholder, not the painting. The open-access file from The National Gallery, London replaces it when the gallery's image pipeline runs — we would rather show you a card that says so than a reproduction we have not verified.
Romanticism
Dido building Carthage
J. M. W. Turner · 1815
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 155.5 × 231.8 cm
- Held by
- The National Gallery, London
- Licence
- Public domain
- Movement
- Romanticism
- Country
- United Kingdom
The painter
J. M. W. Turner
Turner was a barber's son from Covent Garden who entered the Royal Academy schools at fourteen, exhibited there at fifteen, and became a full Academician at twenty-six — about as fast as the English art establishment has ever moved. For the first half of his career he competed openly with the dead: specifically with Claude Lorrain, whose golden harbour scenes he set out to equal and then to surpass, and he left paintings to the nation on the condition that they hang beside Claudes so the comparison could be made. The second half is the one that matters to later painting.
Nearby
Related works
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Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth
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What to look at
This is Turner competing directly with a dead man. Claude Lorrain had invented the golden harbour scene a hundred and fifty years earlier — classical buildings flanking a bay, the sun low and central, everything bathed — and Turner spent his career measuring himself against it. He left this painting to the nation on the explicit condition that it hang between two Claudes, which is where it still hangs. The sun sits almost exactly on the central axis and the architecture is arranged symmetrically on either side like a stage set. Dido is the small figure in blue and white at the left. The subject is the founding of a great maritime empire, painted in Britain in 1815, the year of Waterloo, and Turner later painted its decline as a pendant — the pairing is the argument.