The Fountain of Indolence

Turner hung this at the Royal Academy in May 1834, at Somerset House, and the reviews were friendly. The subject was already old: James Thomson's poem The Castle of Indolence, published in 1748, in which a fountain in an enchanted court pours out a drink that washes away every earthly care, and the figures around the basin are taking it. Five years later Turner showed a painting called The Fountain of Fallacy at the British Institution, quoting four lines of his own verse beside it. Descriptions of that picture fit this one, no second canvas of the size has ever surfaced, and Martin Butlin, who catalogued Turner's paintings, concluded that there was and is only one. Where it spent the years between 1834 and 1882 nobody knows. After that it passed through a London dealer to the Vanderbilts in New York, and in 1958 to Lord Beaverbrook, who wanted a first-rate Turner for the gallery he was about to open in Fredericton.