A deusa da discórdia escolhendo a maçã da discórdia no jardim das Hespérides

In 1806 a group of London collectors opened the first exhibition of their new British Institution, founded the year before to encourage English painting that could hang beside the old masters they already owned. Turner sent this. The canvas is over two metres wide, a Greek myth set in mountain country worked up from the Alpine tour he had made in 1802. The nymphs guard the golden apples at the western edge of the world while the goddess of discord takes the one that will be handed to the Trojan prince Paris and set off the war at Troy. Along the ridge above them the dragon Ladon lies stretched on the rock, near enough to have stopped all this and doing nothing. Turner built the picture from drawings made in 1805, one sheet given over to the dragon alone. Those studies and the painting came to the nation together in the Turner Bequest of 1856.