Turner. Landscapes of Mythology

The exhibition draws from the artist's extensive collection of works held at the Tate UK. Counting some forty pieces, the selection includes striking and impressive oil paintings (made by Turner to be exhibited at the Royal Academy in London), as well as smaller oil sketches and watercolours in which the artist gave free rein to his creativity in the reproduction of landscapes inspired by the themes from classical mythology.

Working during the first half of the 19th century, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) is one of Britain's best-loved and best-known artists. He is famous for his remarkable variety of landscape paintings, extraordinary inventiveness and expressive use of colour.
His career developed during the current of Romanticism, which saw painters move away from the constraining artistic subjects and controlled manipulation of the neo-classical period and develop a much more personal figurative language.

However, Turner, after two trips to Italy in 1819 and 1828, and influenced by Richard Wilson, a British artist who lived for a long period between Rome and Naples in the second half of the 18th century, began to choose the Italian landscapes (real or generic) as a background for its mythological subjects choosing more intense colours and rich atmospheric effects.
The Bay of Baiae with Apollo and the Sibyl (1823) (The Gulf of Baia with Apollo and the Sibyl) is an excellent example of the mythological works of a more mature Turner. The backdrop of Roman ruins and the figure of the Cumaean Sibyl, whose voice would fade in time, represent some of the themes Turner held most dear: beauty and decadence, glory and decline, the fragility of life and the disappearance of empires.

The exhibition is curated by Anne Lyles.
Exhibition organised in collaboration with the Tate, UK.