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Artist J.M.W. Turner, RA. The Engravings. Perhaps the most famous English Romantic landscape artist. Turner
products many engravings and was very hands-on in there progress to printings.
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Lake Avernus - The Fates and the Golden Bough
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| This picture is one of the Vernon Collection now in the National Gallery; it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1834. As a
specimen of Turner’s ideal-landscape painting it is, perhaps. unrivalled for its size. Its richness of colour, aerial perspective,
and the infinite fullness of every inch of the canvas appear miraculous. In the Catalogue of the National Gallery- it is called “Lake
Avernus—The Fates and the Golden Bough.” The golden bough, as described by Virgil in the sixth book of the AEneid, grew on a tree in
a grove near Lake Avermis, and was the passport to the Infernal Regions. AEneas, wishing to visit his father Anchises in the nether
world, was directed by the Cuma3an Sibyl to seek for and pluck this bough, which with the aid of the doves of his mother, Venus, he
succeeded doing. What Turner precisely meant by the figures in this picture it is difficult to say; but, speaking of this picture and
that of “ The Bay of Baiae," Ruskin remarks that “in both these pictures there is a snake in the foreground - among the fairest
leafage, a type of the terror, or temptation, which is associated with the lovely landscapes; and it is curious that Turner seems to
have - exerted all L strength to give the most alluring loveliness to the soft descents of the Avernus Lake.” |
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