| The Golden Bough | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | J. M. W. Turner |
| Year | 1834 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 104.1 cm× 163.8 cm(41.0 in× 64.5 in) |
| Location | Tate Gallery, London |
The Golden Bough is a painting from 1834 by the English painter J. M. W. Turner. It depicts the episode of the golden bough from the Aeneid by Virgil. It is in the collection of the Tate galleries.
John Ruskin described The Golden Bough as a sequel to Turner's 1823 painting The Bay of Baiae, which is based on the myth of Apollo and the Cumaean Sibyl. [1]
The painting depicts a scene from book VI of the ancient Roman epic Aeneid by Virgil. Turner has used Christopher Pitt's English translation. [2] The hero Aeneas wants to enter the Underworld to consult his dead father. The Sibyl of Cumae tells him that he needs to offer a golden bough from a sacred tree to Proserpine in order to enter. The painting shows the landscape around the lake Avernus, which is the entrance to the Underworld. The Sibyl stands to the left and holds a sickle and the cut bough. Dancing Fates in the background and a snake in the foreground forebode the mysteries of the Underworld. [3]
The collector Robert Vernon bought the painting before it had been exhibited publicly. It was shown at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1834. Vernon gave it to the National Gallery in 1847, and in 1929 it was transferred to the Tate Gallery. [2] It remains in the collection of the Tate galleries, but as of 2020 was not on display. [3]
James George Frazer evokes the painting in his book The Golden Bough (1890), which speculatively reconstructs a mental image which according to Frazer connects many myths and religious practices. The book would go on to influence many writers. Turner's painting serves as its frontispiece and is addressed in the opening paragraph:
Who does not know Turner's picture of the Golden Bough? The scene, suffused with the golden glow of imagination in which the divine mind of Turner steeped and transfigured even the fairest natural landscape, is a dream-like vision of the little woodland lake of Nemi, "Diana's Mirror," as it was called by the ancients. No one who has seen that calm water, lapped in a green hollow of the Alban hills, can ever forget it. The two characteristic Italian villages which slumber on its banks, and the equally Italian palazzo whose terraced gardens descend steeply to the lake, hardly break the stillness and even the solitariness of the scene. Dian herself might still linger by this lonely shore, still haunt these woodlands wild. [4]
In Greek mythology, Scylla is a legendary monster who lives on one side of a narrow channel of water, opposite her counterpart Charybdis. The two sides of the strait are within an arrow's range of each other—so close that sailors attempting to avoid Charybdis would pass dangerously close to Scylla and vice versa.
Joseph Mallord William Turner, known in his time as William Turner, was an English Romantic painter, printmaker and watercolourist. He is known for his expressive colouring, imaginative landscapes and turbulent, often violent marine paintings. He left behind more than 550 oil paintings, 2,000 watercolours, and 30,000 works on paper. He was championed by the leading English art critic John Ruskin from 1840, and is today regarded as having elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting.
The Acheron is a river located in the Epirus region of northwest Greece. It is 52 km (32 mi) long, and its drainage area is 705 km2 (272 sq mi). Its source is near the village Zotiko, in the southwestern part of the Ioannina regional unit, and it flows into the Ionian Sea in Ammoudia, near Parga.
In Greek mythology, Charon or Kharon is a psychopomp, the ferryman of Hades, the Greek underworld and is the son of Erebus and Nyx. He carries the souls of those who have been given funeral rites across the rivers Acheron and Styx, which separate the worlds of the living and the dead. Archaeology confirms that, in some burials, low-value coins were placed in, on, or near the mouth of the deceased, or next to the cremation urn containing their ashes. This has been taken to confirm that at least some aspects of Charon's mytheme are reflected in some Greek and Roman funeral practices, or else the coins function as a viaticum for the soul's journey. In Virgil's epic poem, Aeneid, the dead who could not pay the fee, and those who had received no funeral rites, had to wander the near shores of the Styx for one hundred years before they were allowed to cross the river.
The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion is a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer. The Golden Bough was first published in two volumes in 1890; in three volumes in 1900; and in twelve volumes in the third edition, published 1906–1915. It has also been published in several different one-volume abridgments. The work was aimed at a wide literate audience raised on tales as told in such publications as Thomas Bulfinch's The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes (1855). The influence of The Golden Bough on contemporary European literature and thought was substantial.
Samuel Prout was a British watercolourist, and one of the masters of watercolour architectural painting. Prout secured the position of Painter in Water-Colours in Ordinary to King George IV in 1829 and afterwards to Queen Victoria. John Ruskin, whose work often emulated Prout's, wrote in 1844, "Sometimes I tire of Turner, but never of Prout". Prout is often compared to his contemporaries: Turner, Constable and Ruskin, whom he taught. He was the uncle of the artist John Skinner Prout.
Sir James George Frazer was a Scottish social anthropologist and folklorist influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion. His reputation was improved after his new wife in 1896, Lilly Frazer, decided that he was undervalued and that she would improve his impact.
The rex Nemorensis was a priest of the goddess Diana at Aricia in Italy, by the shores of Lake Nemi, where she was known as Diana Nemorensis. The priesthood played a major role in the mythography of James George Frazer in The Golden Bough; his interpretation has exerted a lasting influence.
In Roman literature, Erichtho is a legendary Thessalian witch who appears in several literary works. She is noted for her horrifying appearance and her impious ways. Her first major role was in the Roman poet Lucan's epic Pharsalia, which details Caesar's Civil War. In the work, Pompey the Great's son, Sextus Pompeius, seeks her, hoping that she will be able to reveal the future concerning the imminent Battle of Pharsalus. In a gruesome scene, she finds a dead body, fills it with potions, and raises it from the dead. The corpse describes a civil war that is plaguing the underworld and delivers a prophecy about what fate lies in store for Pompey and his kin.
A katabasis or catabasis is a journey to the underworld. Its original sense is usually associated with Greek mythology and Classical mythology more broadly, where the protagonist visits the Greek underworld, also known as Hades. The term is also used in a broad sense of any journey to the realm of the dead in other mythological and religious traditions. A katabasis is similar to a nekyia or necromancy, where someone experiences a vision of the underworld or its inhabitants; a nekyia does not generally involve a physical visit, however. One of the most famous examples is that of Odysseus, who performs something on the border of a nekyia and a katabasis in book 11 of The Odyssey; he visits the border of the realms before calling the dead to him using a blood ritual, with it being disputed whether he was at the highest realm of the underworld or the lowest edge of the living world where he performed this.
Diana Nemorensis, also known as "Diana of the Wood", was an Italic form of the goddess who became Hellenised during the fourth century BC and conflated with Artemis. Her sanctuary was to be found on the northern shore of Lake Nemi beneath the cliffs of the modern city Nemi. This lake is referred to by poets as speculum Dianae – "Diana's Mirror"; by the town of Aricia which was situated about three miles off, at the foot of the Albanus Mons, the Alban Mount, and separated by a steep descent from the lake, which lies in a small crater-like hollow on the mountainside.
'A 'nocturne' its broader sense distinguishes paintings of a night scene, or night-piece, such as Rembrandt's The Night Watch, or the German Romantic Caspar David Friedrich's Two Men Contemplating the Moon of 1819.
The Cumaean Sibyl was the priestess presiding over the Apollonian oracle at Cumae, a Greek colony near Naples, Italy. The word sibyl comes from the ancient Greek word sibylla, meaning prophetess. There were many sibyls throughout the ancient world. Because of the importance of the Cumaean Sibyl in the legends of early Rome as codified in Virgil's Aeneid VI, and because of her proximity to Rome, the Cumaean Sibyl became the most famous among the Romans. The Erythraean Sibyl from modern-day Turkey was famed among Greeks, as was the oldest Hellenic oracle, the Sibyl of Dodona, dating to the second millennium BC according to Herodotus, favored in the east.
The Golden Bough is one of the episodic tales written in the epic Aeneid, book VI, by the Roman poet Virgil, which narrates the adventures of the Trojan hero Aeneas after the Trojan War.
Dido building Carthage, or The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire is an oil on canvas painting by J. M. W. Turner. The painting is one of Turner's most important works, greatly influenced by the luminous classical landscapes of Claude Lorrain. Turner described it as his chef d'oeuvre. First exhibited at the Royal Academy summer exhibition in 1815, Turner kept the painting until he left it to the nation in the Turner Bequest. It has been held by the National Gallery in London since 1856.
The Fountain of Indolence is an oil painting by the English artist J. M. W. Turner. First exhibited in 1834, it is now in the collection of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada.
Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus is an 1829 oil painting by Joseph Mallord William Turner. It depicts a scene from Homer's Odyssey, showing Odysseus (Ulysses) standing on his ship deriding Polyphemus, one of the cyclopes he encounters and has recently blinded, who is disguised behind one of the mountains on the left side. Additional details include the Trojan Horse, a scene from Virgil's Aeneid, on one of the flags and the horses of Apollo rising above the horizon. This painting is thought to be quickly done as a replacement for previous paintings submitted to the Academy that had been delayed. The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1829. Acquired by the National Gallery in 1856, the painting is on display in room 34.
The Dort, or Dort or Dordrecht: The Dort packet-boat from Rotterdam becalmed is an 1818 painting by J. M. W. Turner, based on drawings made by him in mid September 1817. It shows a view of the harbour of Dordrecht. It is the finest example of the influence of Dutch marine painting on Turner's work.
Martin Richard Fletcher Butlin, CBE, FBA, is a British art historian. His main field of study is British art history and his published works reflect, in particular, a study of art of the 18th and 19th centuries. He is an authority on J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) and William Blake (1757–1827).
Fishermen at Sea, sometimes known as the Cholmeley Sea Piece, is an early oil painting by English artist J. M. W. Turner. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1796 and has been owned by the Tate Gallery since 1972. It was the first oil painting by Turner to be exhibited at the Royal Academy. It was praised by contemporary critics and burnished Turner's reputation, both as an oil painter and as a painter of maritime scenes.
