The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire ...

Turner showed this in 1817, two years after Waterloo had finally settled Britain's long war with Napoleon's France. The mood in the picture is not triumph. The sun is going down over Carthage, the great trading empire that Rome ground down and destroyed, and the whole scene glows with a heavy golden dusk. It was the companion to an earlier canvas showing Carthage being built, so the two together run an empire from its dawn to its ruin. Turner meant the comparison to land close to home. Britain had just beaten its own great rival and was now the dominant power, and Carthage stood as a reminder of how such fortunes turn. He tied the work so closely to himself that he left it to the nation in his will.