Bacchus and Ariadne

The National Gallery bought Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne in 1826, and for the next generation any London painter taking on the subject was answering that picture. Turner was 65 when he showed his version at the Royal Academy in 1840. He kept the story, the god catching sight of Ariadne abandoned on Naxos and leaping from his chariot, and he kept almost nothing else. Titian gives a hard blue sky and figures you can count. Turner puts his group in a haze of yellow and pink and lets the middle of the canvas go to light. He painted it square, 79 centimetres each way, a shape he turned to repeatedly in his last decade. He never sold it, and it came to the nation in 1856 with everything else still standing in his own gallery.