The Death of Dido

In the spring of 1781 London crowded into the new rooms at Somerset House for the Royal Academy show, and there hung this scene from Virgil's Aeneid. Dido, queen of Carthage, had taken in the Trojan hero Aeneas and fallen for him; when the gods ordered him to sail on and found Rome, she built a pyre, climbed it and ran herself through with the sword he left behind. Reynolds catches her at the last breath, her sister Anna and a servant grieving over her. Look past them to the horizon on the left, where small ships are already standing out to sea. That is Aeneas's fleet, the departure that undid her. The subject was in the air that season: the younger painter Henry Fuseli showed his own Death of Dido in the same exhibition, and visitors walked between the two, comparing.