Exhibited 1817
Oil on canvas

The complete title of Turner’s painting is a daunting fifty-one words long: The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire – Rome being determined on the Overthrow of Her Hated Rival, demanded from her such Terms as might either force her into War, or ruin her by Compliance: the Enervated Carthaginians, in their Anxiety for Peace, consented to give up even their Arms and their Children.  It was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1817 and Turner further structured his viewers’ responses to the painting by appending the following verse:

At Hope’s delusive smile,
The chieftain’s safety and the mother’s pride,
Were to th’insidious conqu’ror’s grasp resign’d;
While o’er the western wave th’ensanguin’d sun,
In gathering haze a stormy signal spread,
And set portentous.

According to legend, the ancient state of Carthage in North Africa was founded by Queen Dido, daughter of the King of Tyre. Her story was related by Virgil in his epic Aeneid, which told how the Trojan hero Aeneas fled to Carthage and fell in love with her. When Aeneas abandoned Dido to resume his search for a new homeland, she perished in despair on her own funeral pyre. Over the course of his lifetime Turner completed a number of paintings charting both the known history of Carthage and the legend of Aeneas’s quest for Rome. The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire is pair to an earlier work, Dido Building Carthage; or the Rise of the Carthaginian Empire, exhibited in 1815. Both are large seaport scenes dominated by the sun, symbolically rising or setting in the centre of the composition, and reflect the unmistakable style of Claude Lorrain. Following the terms of Turner’s will, Dido Building Carthage now hangs in the National Gallery, side by side with Claude’s masterpiece, Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba (fig.67). Turner admired Claude more than any other artist and deliberately set out to emulate and develop the seventeenth-century master’s vision of landscape. In The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire he has invested his painting with the pure colours and golden light characteristic of Claude’s work.

The reference in the extended title of the painting and in the accompanying verse is to the Punic Wars, which raged between Rome and Carthage for nearly 120 years. Over the course of three separate campaigns the mighty Carthaginian empire was implacably worn down until, in 146 bc, the Romans invaded the city itself, destroying it completely, and killing and enslaving the inhabitants. Turner’s painting illustrates the waning spirit of the empire, rather than the physical decline of the city. The glorious architecture of the harbour is untouched but the various scattered objects in the foreground suggest detritus and a sense of melancholic resignation. Most of the Carthaginians seen gathered at the water’s edge are women who gaze into the dwindling light of the setting sun. The remnants of the fleet are seen departing with the city’s young men aboard, destined for death or slavery in Rome. In the shadows of the foreground an abandoned child’s toy boat founders as the waves gather more strength. The notion of the rise and fall of empires was a popular historical theory in the early nineteenth century, perpetuated by such celebrated volumes as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88). The idea of two great maritime nations in conflict also held resonance for contemporary viewers who made comparisons with the struggle between England and France during the Napoleonic Wars.

Turner had first recorded preparatory ideas for the painting a few years earlier, amidst his English topographical sketches. This demonstrates effectively how ideas of history and the classical landscape were inextricably bound up in the artist’s mind with his contemplations of his native country.