Jason

Turner was elected a full member of the Royal Academy in February 1802, at 26, one of the youngest ever given it. Jason was among the four oils he sent to the Summer Exhibition that year, his first showing as an academician. A few months later he crossed the Channel for the first time in his life. Britain and France had signed the Peace of Amiens, a short truce in the war with Napoleon, and a group of patrons paid for him to see the Louvre, then filled with pictures the French armies had brought back from Italy. So Jason was painted by a man who had never left England, working from a recent English translation of the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes. When he exhibited the picture again in 1808 the catalogue called it Jason, from Ovid's Metamorphosis, crediting the wrong poet.