Aeneas and the Sibyl, Lake Avernus

By 1798 Britain had been at war with revolutionary France for five years and the road to Italy was shut. Turner was 23 and had never been there. For this view of Lake Avernus, the sulphurous crater near Naples that Virgil made the entrance to the underworld, he worked from a drawing by the collector Sir Richard Colt Hoare, who had travelled the country before the war closed it. Hoare's house at Stourhead already held a landscape of Lake Nemi by Richard Wilson that he had bought thinking it showed Avernus, and this canvas was probably meant to hang alongside it. Aeneas and the sibyl are the two small figures down on the shore. Turner finally stood at the real lake in 1819, at 44, and filled a sketchbook with it.