Oil paint on wood
Tate Collection
Works with images
Works on loan
Joseph Mallord William Turner
Turner Bequest
Oil paintings
Collection
Turner owned by Tate
<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/joseph-mallord-william-turner-558" aria-label="More by Joseph Mallord William Turner" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">Joseph Mallord William Turner</a>
Story Apollo and Daphne
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
actions: expressive
adults
animals: mammals
Apollo
architecture
building
classical
classical myths: gods and heroes
Daphne
dog - non-specific
emotions, concepts and ideas
fleeing
group
groups
hare
landscape
man
mountain
people
periods and styles
religion and belief
river
ruins
transformation
tree
universal concepts
valley
water: inland
waterfall
woman
<p>Turner followed his usual process of painting the sky with unmodified oil paint. Over this lies a transparent glaze, rich in oil, which has become greenish-yellow and more obvious now. Turner strengthened the mountain tops, some clouds, and a building, by adding similar paint after the original had cracked as it dried. This paint retains texture and body, and may have included resin or megilp, which would account for the early crack formation.</p><p>The landscape and receding hills were probably painted with the wax-oil formulation he used in other paintings to give a smooth translucent paint, enlivened with dabs of megilp-rich impasto for details. In the shadows of the landscape Turner probably used a paint rich in lead-based driers, which would have formed the wide cracks very quickly, even as it dried.</p><p><em>Gallery label, February 2010</em></p>
painting oil paint wood
14 August 2009 – 19 July 2010
2010-07-19
14 August 2009 – 19 July 2010
2010-07-19
2009-08-14
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2009-08-14
Exploring Technique
Collection based display
10 September 2014 – 20 September 2015
2015-09-20
10 September 2014 – 25 January 2015
2015-01-25
2014-09-10
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2014-09-10
Late Turner: Painting Set Free
Exhibition
29 March 2019 – 5 October 2019
2019-10-05
29 March 2019 – 23 June 2019
2019-06-23
2019-03-29
York Art Gallery (York, UK)
http://www.york.art.museum
2019-03-29
Turner, Ruskin and the Storm Cloud of the Modern World
Loan-out
16 October 2021 – 14 July 2023
2023-07-14
16 October 2021 – 6 March 2022
2022-03-06
2021-10-16
ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum (Aarhus, Denmark)
18 May 2022 – 11 September 2022
2022-09-11
2022-05-18
Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (Barcelona, Spain)
http://www.mnac.es
8 October 2022 – 5 February 2023
2023-02-05
2022-10-08
National Gallery of Ireland (Dublin, Ireland)
http://www.nationalgallery.ie
3 March 2023 – 25 June 2023
2023-06-25
2023-03-03
Fondation Pierre Gianadda (Martigny, Switzerland)
2021-10-16
Turner Watercolours: Sun is God
Tate partnerships & programmes
12 October 2023 – 28 January 2024
2024-01-28
12 October 2023 – 28 January 2024
2024-01-28
2023-10-12
Reggia di Venaria Reale (Turin, Italy)
2023-10-12
Turner & Mythology
Loan-out
6 July 2024 – 15 January 2028
2028-01-15
6 July 2024 – 1 September 2024
2024-09-01
2024-07-06
Grimaldi Forum (Monaco, Monaco)
30 September 2024 – 7 May 2025
2025-05-07
2024-09-30
Museum of Art Pudong (Shanghai, China)
21 June 2025 – 5 October 2025
2025-10-05
2025-06-21
Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane, Australia)
1 June 2026 – 1 October 2026
2026-10-01
2026-06-01
External
15 November 2026 – 15 March 2027
2027-03-15
2026-11-15
External
1 May 2027 – 1 September 2027
2027-09-01
2027-05-01
External
15 October 2027 – 15 January 2028
2028-01-15
2027-10-15
External
2024-07-06
Turner's Sublime Legacy
Tate partnerships & programmes
Story of Apollo and Daphne
support: 1099 × 1988 mm
frame: 1519 × 2398 × 200 mm
Accepted by the nation as part of the <a href="/search?gid=999999781" data-gtm-name="tombstone_link_bequest" data-gtm-destination="list-page--search-results">Turner Bequest</a> 1856
<p>Turner followed his usual process of painting the sky with unmodified oil paint. Over this lies a transparent glaze, rich in oil, which has become greenish-yellow and more obvious now. Turner strengthened the mountain tops, some clouds, and a building, by adding similar paint after the original had cracked as it dried. This paint retains texture and body, and may have included resin or megilp, which would account for the early crack formation. 
<br/>
<br/>The landscape and receding hills were probably painted with the wax-oil formulation he used in other paintings to give a smooth translucent paint, enlivened with dabs of megilp-rich impasto for details. In the shadows of the landscape Turner probably used a paint rich in lead-based driers, which would have formed the wide cracks very quickly, even as it dried. 
<br/></p>

Display caption
2010-02-18T00:00:00
display-caption
DISPLAY_CAPTION
<p><b>369. </b>[<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-story-of-apollo-and-daphne-n00520" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N00520</span></a>]<b> Story of Apollo and Daphne Exh.</b> 1837</p>
<p>THE TATE GALLERY, LONDON (520)</p>
<p>Mahogany, 43 1/4 × 78 1/4 (110 × 199)</p>
<p><b>Coll.</b> Turner Bequest 1856 (27, ‘Apollo and Daphne’ 6'5 1/2" × 3'7"); transferred to the Tate Gallery 1929.</p>
<p><b>Exh.</b> R.A. 1837 (130).</p>
<p><b>Lit.</b> Ruskin 1843, 1856, 1860 and 1857 (1903–12, iii, pp. 337–8, 453–4; v, p. 391; vi, p. 353; vii, p. 484; xiii, pp. 148–50); Thornbury 1862, i, pp. 329–30; 1877, p. 454; Bell 1901, p. 132 no. 204; Armstrong 1902, p. 218; Davies 1946, p. 186; Finberg 1961, pp. 367, 500 no. 473; Rothenstein and Butlin 1964, p. 56; Lindsay 1966, p. 183; Reynolds 1969, p. 169; Gage 1972, pp. 20–21, pls. 9a and b (detail); Raymond Lister (ed.), <i>The Letters of Samuel Palmer</i> 1974, i, p. 182; Herrmann 1975, p. 44; Wilton 1979, p. 195; Paulson 1982, p. 92.</p>
<p>Exhibited at the R.A. with the following caption, which uses Dryden's translation:</p>
<p align="center">—<i>Ovid's Metamorphoses</i>.</p>
<p>‘Sure is my bow, unerring is my dart;
<br/>But, ah! more deadly his who pierced my heart.</p>
<p>*         *         *         *         *         *         *         *</p>
<p>As when th'impatient greyhound, slipt from far,<br/>Bounds o'er the glebe to course the fearful hare,
<br/>She, in her speed, does all her safety lay;
<br/>And he, with double speed, pursues the prey.’</p>
<p>Ruskin, in his notes on the Turner gallery at Marlborough House, explains the subject: 'It is necessary, however, that the reader should in this case, as in that of the “Bay of Baiae” [No. 230 [<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-the-bay-of-baiae-with-apollo-and-the-sibyl-n00505" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N00505</span></a>]], understand Turner's meaning in the figures, and their relation to the <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/l/landscape" title="Glossary definition for 'Landscape'"><span>landscape</span></a>. Daphne was the daughter of the river Peneus, the most fertilizing of the Greek rivers, by the goddess Terra (the earth). She represents, therefore, the spirit of all foliage, as springing from the earth, watered by rivers; rather than the laurel merely. Apollo became enamoured of her, on the shore of the Peneus itself—that is to say, either in the great vale of Larissa, or in that of Tempe. The scene is here meant for Tempe, because it opens to the sea: it is not in the least <i>like</i> Tempe, which is a narrow ravine: but it expressed the accepted idea of the valley as far as Turner could interpret it, it having long been a type to us moderns of all lovely glens or vales descending from the mountains to the sea. The immediate cause of Apollo's servitude to Daphne was his having insulted Cupid, and mocked at his arrows. Cupid answered, simply, “Thy bow strikes all things, Apollo, but mine shall strike <i>Thee</i>.”</p>
<p>'The boy god is seen in the pictures behind Apollo and Daphne. Afterwards, when Daphne flies and Apollo pursues, Ovid compares them to a dog of Gaul, coursing a hare—the greyhound and hare Turner has, therefore, put into the foreground. When Daphne is nearly exhausted, she appeals to her father, the river Peneus—“gazing at his waves”—and he transforms her into a laurel on his shore. That is to say, the life of the foliage—the child of the river and the earth—appeals again to the river, when the sun would burn it up; and the river protects it with its flow and spray, keeping it green for ever.</p>
<p>‘So then the whole picture is to be illustrative of the union of the rivers and the earth; and of the perpetual help and delight granted by the streams, in their dew, to the earth's foliage.’</p>
<p>Unlike Ruskin, <i>Blackwood's Magazine</i> for July–December 1837 thought that Turner had ‘odd notions of a simile. He makes it precede, and thrusts it into the very foreground before his figures, and there we have such a hare and hound! and to show the hound has the poet's “double-speed”, the poor white-livered dog Apollo stands stock-still in friddled feebleness, and the red-nosed Daphne waiting lamentably to be caught. But the ground, or whatever we may please to call it, of the piece, is neither earth nor water, nor anything that grows, or ever grew on it, or in it.’ The rest of the press was rather more complimentary. For the <i>Spectator</i>, 6 May, the landscape was ‘a wonder of art; a splendid picture of nature, and with a less share than usual of his [Turner's] glaring defects’. The <i>Athenaeum</i> of the same date wrote that ‘Mr. Turner's grand landscape of <i>Apollo and Daphne</i> ..., though sufficiently exuberant in its invention, and rich in its colouring, and exceptionable in the careless deficiency of its figures, is more moderate than the last-mentioned extravaganza [<i>Hero and Leander</i>, No. 370 [<span>N00521</span>]], and we therefore prefer it, at the risk of being called lukewarm and one-sided.’ For the <i>Literary Gazette</i>, again of the same date, the picture was ‘One of those gorgeous effects of prismatic colours in all their original and distinct vividness, which under any other management than that of Mr. Turner, would be offensive; but which he renders absolutely magical.’</p>
<p>Samuel Palmer, writing to John Linnell from Italy on 22 August 1838, said that ‘Turner's corruscation of tints and blooms in the middle distance of his Apollo and Daphne is nearly, tho' not quite so much a mystery as ever: and I am inclined to think that it is like what Paganini's violin playing is said to have been; something to which no one ever did or will do the like; though Claude and Titian have done just as well or better in another way.’ For another example of a parallel being drawn between Turner and Paganini see No. 342 [<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-childe-harolds-pilgrimage-italy-n00516" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N00516</span></a>].</p>
<p>Finberg suggests that this picture may have been in hand for some years but there are no particular stylistic or technical reasons to support this. The picture was however completed in its frame, presumably when sent into the Royal <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/a/academy" title="Glossary definition for 'Academy'"><span>Academy</span></a> in 1837. There is some <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/b/bitumen" title="Glossary definition for 'Bitumen'"><span>bituminous</span></a> and drying crackle.</p>
<p><b>Published in:</b>
<br/>Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, <i>The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner</i>, revised ed., New Haven and London 1984
<br/></p>

Catalogue entry
2004-09-22T00:00:00
catalogue-entry
CATALOGUE_ENTRY
actions: expressive adults animals: mammals Apollo architecture building classical classical myths: gods and heroes Daphne dog - non-specific emotions, concepts and ideas fleeing group groups hare landscape man mountain people periods and styles religion and belief river ruins transformation tree universal concepts valley waterfall water: inland woman