By Kind Permission of a Private Collection
By Kind Permission of a Private Collection
Turner 's The decline of the Carthaginian Empire, oil on canvas, exhibited Royal Academy 1817, Turner Bequest, Tate Britain ( Wilton P135).
Ruskin never had a very high opinion of Turner 's big early classical oils painted in emulation of Claude. He thought the two Carthages bad in colour, heavy in foreground, and covered in over-accumulated detail; since they showed little attention to the observation of the world of nature and reality, he placed them in the category of 'nonsense pictures,' along with other classical subjects such as Cicero's Villa.
In his Notes on the Turner Gallery at Marlborough House (1857), Ruskin repeated his view of The decline of the Carthaginian Empire as 'one of the deepest humiliations which Turner's art ever sustained... little more than an accumulation of Academy students' outlines, coloured brown' ( Works, 13.124).
J.M.W. Turner 1775-1851
The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire 1817
Oil on canvas, 170x238.5cm
Exhibitions: RA 1817 (195); RA 1974 (165)
Engraving:
Engraved by J.B. Allen, 1859
Steel engraving, 17.6x25.2cm
Engraved for the Turner Gallery, 1859-1875
Provenance: Turner Bequest 1856; transferred to the Tate Gallery in 1929 (499)
Collection: Tate Gallery, London