Joseph Mallord William Turner

The Death of Actaeon, with a Distant View of Montjovet, Val d’Aosta

c.1837

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Not on display

Artist: Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Medium: Oil paint on canvas
Dimensions: Support: 1509 × 1125 × 29 mm
frame: 1911 × 1535 × 74 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference: A00909

Display caption

The blurred figures and animals in the foreground of this painting are borrowed and reworked from Titian’s late painting The Death of Actaeon. Having intruded on the sacred grove inhabited by Diana and her naked nymphs, the huntsman Actaeon is punished by being torn to pieces by his own hounds.

Turner sets the action in Italy’s Val d’Aosta, which he had visited in 1836. Unusually, on that occasion he travelled with a companion, the Scottish land-owner and artist HAJ Munro of Novar, who already possessed many of his pictures, and for whom this unfinished work was presumably intended.

Gallery label, February 2010

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