Turner 's Dido building Carthage; or the rise of the Carthaginian Empire, oil on canvas, exhibited Royal Academy 1815, Turner Bequest, National Gallery ( Wilton P131), and 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 these big early classical oils painted in emulation of Claude. He thought them 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).