Oil paint on canvas
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>
Bacchus and Ariadne
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
adults
architecture
Ariadne
bank
building - non-specific
classical myths: gods and heroes
Dionysus / Bacchus
figure
group
groups
natural phenomena
people
reflection
religion and belief
river
townscapes / man-made features
tree
water: inland
<p>Ariadne, daughter of Minos, King of Crete, has been abandoned by Theseus. She is found by Bacchus and taken as his bride. Turner's picture is based on Titian's of the same subject, which had entered the National Gallery in 1826 and was praised by Charles Lamb in an essay published in 1833. For the first time, Turner experimented here with a square canvas, and apparently painted in the final glazes when the picture was already in a round frame.</p><p><em>Gallery label, August 2004</em></p>
painting oil paint canvas
9 October 2003 – 30 May 2004
2004-05-30
9 October 2003 – 11 January 2004
2004-01-11
2003-10-09
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
15 February 2004 – 30 May 2004
2004-05-30
2004-02-15
Kimbell Art Museum (Fort Worth, USA)
http://www.kimbellart.org
2003-10-09
Turner and Venice
Exhibition
8 October 2011 – 28 October 2012
2012-10-28
8 October 2011 – 8 January 2012
2012-01-08
2011-10-08
Moderna Museet (Stockholm, Sweden)
11 February 2012 – 28 May 2012
2012-05-28
2012-02-11
Staatsgalerie (Stuttgart, Germany)
http://www.staatsgalerie.de/
29 June 2012 – 28 October 2012
2012-10-28
2012-06-29
Tate Liverpool (Liverpool, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/
2011-10-08
Turner Monet Twombly: Later Paintings
Exhibition
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
6 July 2019 – 2 May 2021
2021-05-02
15 October 2020 – 2 May 2021
2021-05-02
2020-10-15
Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec (Québec, Canada)
http://www.mnba.qc.ca
2019-07-06
The Sea and the Alps: Turner's Quest for the Sublime
Tate partnerships & programmes
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)
2024-07-06
Turner's Sublime Legacy
Tate partnerships & programmes
Bacchus and Ariadne
support: 787 × 787 mm
frame: 1040 × 1041 × 125 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>Ariadne, daughter of Minos, King of Crete, has been abandoned by Theseus. She is found by Bacchus and taken as his bride. Turner's picture  is based on Titian's of the same subject, which  had entered the National Gallery in 1826 and  was praised by Charles Lamb in an essay  published in 1833. For the first time, Turner  experimented here with a square <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/c/canvas" title="Glossary definition for 'Canvas'"><span>canvas</span></a>, and apparently painted in the final glazes when  the picture was already in a round frame.</p>
Display caption
2004-08-18T00:00:00
display-caption
DISPLAY_CAPTION
<p><b>382. </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-bacchus-and-ariadne-n00525" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N00525</span></a>]<b> Bacchus and Ariadne</b> Exh. 1840</p>
<p>THE TATE GALLERY, LONDON (525)</p>
<p>Canvas, 31 × 31 (79 × 79)</p>
<p><b>Coll.</b> Turner Bequest 1856 (91, ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’ 2'7" × 2'6 1/2"); transferred to the Tate Gallery 1929.</p>
<p><b>Exh.</b> R.A. 1840 (27).</p>
<p><b>Lit.</b> Ruskin 1857 (1903–12, xiii, pp. 157–8); Thornbury 1862, i, p. 346; 1877, p. 465; Hamerton 1879, p. 285; Bell 1901, p. 138 no. 218; Armstrong 1902, p. 218; Davies 1946, p. 187; Finberg 1961, pp. 379, 505 no. 530; Rothenstein and Butlin 1964, p. 70; Lindsay 1966, pp. 185, 204; Reynolds 1969, p. 179; Charles F. Stuckey, ‘Temporal Imagery in the Early Romantic Landscape’, University of Pennsylvania dissertation 1972, p. 182; Wallace 1979, pp. 110–11, pl. 6.</p>
<p>Ariadne, daughter of Minos, King of Crete, was deserted by Theseus on the island of Naxos; 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/p/painting" title="Glossary definition for 'Painting'"><span>painting</span></a> shows her discovery by Bacchus, who made her his bride. The figures are closely based on Titian's picture of the same subject, which had entered the National Gallery in 1826. Stuckey has pointed out that this painting may be in part a response to Charles Lamb's praise of Titian's painting in his essay ‘On the Total Effect of the Quality of Imagination, Observable in the Works of Modern British Artists’, published in <i>The Athenaeum</i> in 1833 (E.V. Lucas, ed., <i>The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb</i>, 1903, ii, pp. 226–34).</p>
<p>Turner's debt to Titian was recognised by the critic of <i>Blackwood's Magazine</i>, September 1840, in one of his usual abusive reviews: ‘to this we turn with instant pain and from it with great disgust ... Here we have such an Ariadne and such a Bacchus as for ever, if the picture be remembered, must cast ridicule upon the subject, and is therefore injurious to the well-known Titian in the National Gallery, from which Turner (as one would think, malevolently) has burlesqued the figures. Ariadne is the oddest creature! Mr. Turner has contrived to scratch in, we cannot say paint, at once a profile and a full face, but without shadow; so that Ariadne is something between an owl and the fish called old maid—old maid, however, with a numerous family, poor Bacchus and white doll Fauns. This has neither <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/c/composition" title="Glossary definition for 'Composition'"><span>composition</span></a>, nor execution, nor any beauty of any kind that we can see, and is altogether a melancholy absurdity. We find one rather startling novelty, that the sybil's temple was a ruin in the days of Bacchus.’ Other reviews were little kinder. To <i>The Times</i>, 6 May, ‘This picture represents nothing that ever existed in nature and scarcely anything that the most distorted imagination ever conceived without it. The colours are as vivid as the patchwork of a painter's palette, and apparently laid on 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/c/canvas" title="Glossary definition for 'Canvas'"><span>canvas</span></a> by dabbing that implement at haphazard repeatedly against it.’ For the <i>Athenaeum</i>, 16 May, the picture, ‘though little better than a palette, set with the appetizing yellow and brown of an omelette, is tame in its lines, exquisite in its <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/d/drawing" title="Glossary definition for 'Drawing'"><span>drawing</span></a>, and prosaic as to composition, when compared with other works’ by Turner in the exhibition. The <i>Spectator</i> of the same date spoke of ‘The gorgeous explosion of light—literally a sun-burst—that Turner calls <i>Bacchus and Ariadne</i>’ and counted it among his ‘freaks of chromomania’.</p>
<p>Even Ruskin described this picture ‘as the first exhibited in 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/a/academy" title="Glossary definition for 'Academy'"><span>Academy</span></a> which was indicative of definite failure in power of hand and eye; the trees being altogether ill painted, and especially uncertain in form of stem.’</p>
<p>This picture is the first of a number in which Turner experimented with a square canvas, sometimes intended to be framed as a circle or with the corners cut across (see Nos. 394–5, 399–400 [<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-peace-burial-at-sea-n00528" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N00528</span></a>-<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-war-the-exile-and-the-rock-limpet-n00529" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N00529</span></a>], 404–5 [<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-shade-and-darkness-the-evening-of-the-deluge-n00531" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N00531</span></a>-<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-light-and-colour-goethes-theory-the-morning-after-the-deluge-moses-writing-the-book-n00532" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N00532</span></a>] and 424–5 [<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-undine-giving-the-ring-to-massaniello-fisherman-of-naples-n00549" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N00549</span></a>-<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-angel-standing-in-the-sun-n00550" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N00550</span></a>]). In this case, although the paint continues into the corners, Turner seems to have painted the final glazes when the picture was already in a circular frame. In the paint covered by the frame Turner incised some letters, ‘B’ in the right-hand corner and ‘OM’ (or ‘H’) in the upper left-hand corner. For a possible <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/p/pendant" title="Glossary definition for 'Pendant'"><span>pendant</span></a> see No. 394.</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
adults architecture Ariadne bank building - non-specific classical myths: gods and heroes Dionysus / Bacchus figure group groups natural phenomena people reflection religion and belief river townscapes / man-made features tree water: inland