Aesacus and Hesperie, Vide Ovid Metamorphosis, Book Xl; part XIII, plate 66, from Liber Studiorum

Turner sets an Ovidian story of tragic love and transformation within an idyllic landscape. Aesacus saw Hesperia, a nymph daughter of the river Cebren, drying her hair. Upon his pursuit, she ran away only to receive a fatal bite from a snake. Distraught with grief, Aesacus threw himself into the sea, but was changed into a diving bird.

This print showcases Turner’s pictorial talents in landscape, a genre that he would come to redefine with his innovative and dramatic depiction of light and atmosphere. His contemporary John Ruskin noted the exceptional, if improbably flawless, quality of Turner’s treatment of this narrative’s setting: “I can hardly imagine anything so perfect to have been obtained from the real thing; but we know that the imagination must have begun to operate somewhere, we cannot tell where, since the multitudinous harmonies… could hardly in a real scene have continued so inviolately sweet.”