By Kind Permission of a Private Collection
By Kind Permission of a Private Collection
Turner 's The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sybil, oil on canvas, R.A. 1823, Turner Bequest, Tate Britain ( Wilton P230).
In his Notes on the Turner Gallery at Marlborough House (1857), Ruskin classified this as a key painting in Turner 's work, characteristic of what he called his 'second period, or that of mastership,' of 1820-1835 (Works, 13.127-8). He found its overall colour 'unsatisfactory,' with 'the brown demon not quite exorcised,' and criticised Turner 's rendering of the pines as 'having no resemblance to the real tree,' although their shape and sense of natural growth indicated 'naturalism... gradually prevailing over idealism' (Works, 13.144-145). He also considered the composition overcrowded, and recommended viewers to look at its constituent parts through an opening cut into a piece of pasteboard, when 'each of these small subjects becomes more interesting... than the whole picture did before' ( Works, 13.134).
But he admired the work as a rendering of classical myth. The subject is of Apollo granting to Deiphobe, the Cumæan Sibyl, her wish to live for as many years as there might be grains in a handful of dust: to Ruskin this symbolised 'the vanity of human life' ( Modern Painters V; Works, 7.431). 'We are rightly led to think of her here, as the type of the ruined beauty of Italy; foreshadowing, so long ago, her low murmurings of melancholy prophecy, with all the unchanged voices of her sweet waves and mountain echoes' ( Works, 13.132-133).
J.M.W. Turner 1775-1851
The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl 1823
Oil on canvas, 145.5x239cm
Exhibitions: RA 1823 (77); Turner's Gallery, 1835; New York, Chicago and Toronto, 1946-7 (50. Pl.41); Edinburgh, 1968 (4, repr.); RA 1974-5 (237)
Engraving:
Engraved by R. Brandard, 1859
Steel engraving, 16.2x26cm
Engraved for the Turner Gallery, 1859-1875
Provenance: Turner Bequest, 1856; transferred to Tate Gallery, 1910
Collection: Tate Gallery, London