The Golden Bough (J. M. W. Turner)  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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The Golden Bough[1] is a painting by J. M. W. Turner. It is based on the 'Golden Bough' episode in Virgil's Aeneid.

In 1834 Turner exhibited two fanciful pictures, ... [The Golden Bough was] based on the myth that Lake Avernus was the overflowing of Acheron, and one of the entrances to Hades, and that a bough plucked from the tree of Proserpine would enable mortals to enter the dominions of Pluto. It was called The Golden Bough], and a quotation from " The Fallacies of Hope" was sent with it; but the Council at the Academy, for some reason, suppressed the lines, though they left the name of the poem, which should have gone at the foot. The real Lake Avernus is almost completely circular, for it is, in fact, the crater of an extinct volcano. This shape did not take Turner's fancy, and he - has altered it a good deal, putting in a temple and the conventional pine-tree, beneath which are reclining figures. On the left is another classic person with a sickle, holding the golden bough, and standing by a pool. --William Lionel Wyllie

From The Golden Bough incipit

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 palace whose terraced gardens descend steeply to the lake, hardly break the stillness and even the solitariness of the scene. Diana herself might still linger by this lonely shore, still haunt these woodlands wild. The Golden Bough

See also

• The Golden Bough