Dido construyendo Cartago

Turner showed this at the Royal Academy in 1815 and called it his masterpiece, and he meant it against a particular rival. The luminous golden harbour, the sun low over the water, the classical buildings rising on either bank, all of it is Turner measuring himself against Claude Lorrain, the 17th-century painter of ideal ports he revered above everyone. The subject is the queen Dido overseeing the first stones of Carthage, a city that would one day rise and then be destroyed. Turner was so attached to the canvas that he once said he wished to be buried wrapped in it. In his will he left it to the nation on one condition, that it hang forever beside a Claude, and at the National Gallery it still does.