'APOLLO KILLING THE PYTHON' AND A PICNIC
'The Python was a dragon which lived at Crissa, in the vicinity of Delphi, and committed great havoc among cattle and the inhabitants. The Pythian games there celebrated were established in commemoration of the destruction of the Python by Apollo.' So runs the official description in the catalogue appended to 'Apollo Killing the Python.' When it was exhibited in 1811, Turner supplied six lines from the Hymn of Callimachus. beginning:—
'Envenora'd by thy darts, the monster coil'd,
Portentous, horrible, and vast his snake-like form....'
'Mercury and Herse' was illumined by this couplet from Ovid's Metamorphoses:—
> 'Close by the sacred walls in wide Munichio's plain,
The God well pleased beheld the virgin train!'
How tiresome these descriptions and tags of verse seem, and how old-fashioned 'Apollo Killing the Python' looks, yet I have only to gaze at it for five minutes to be hypnotised by its grandeur; but the mood passes, and Ruskin's panegyric does not restore it, that succinct panegyric—'This is one of the very noblest of all Turner's works, and therefore I do not scruple to say, one of the noblest pictures in the world.'
The pages of Modern Painters roll on in magnificent and eloquent periods on 'Apollo Killing the Python.' Certain of the passages one knows by heart, few of them have anything to do with the art of Turner, and some are untrue, such as—'He was without hope'; 'Turner painted the labour of men, their sorrow and their death.' Often Ruskin's prose leaves us breathless, almost crushed:—
'Fancy him [the dragon] moving, and the roaring of the ground under his rings; the grinding down of the rocks by his toothed whorls; the skeleton glacier of him in thunderous march, and the ashes of the hills rising round him like smoke, and encompassing him like a curtain.'
The quotation from Ovid and the theme of 'Apollo Killing the Python' suggest that Ovid's Metamorphoses was one of the few books that Turner really studied and read through, probably again and again, as he found most of his subjects for classical pictures in Ovid. Monkhouse considers that with the exception of 'Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus,' there is none greater than the 'Apollo Killing the Python.' That must remain a matter of opinion. To me it seems that Ovid only confused Turner's imagination. He needed no classical legend to paint such masterpieces as 'Norham Castle at Sunrise,' 'The Evening Star,' 'The Burial of Wilkie,' 'Rain, Steam and Speed,' 'The Snowstorm,' or the later interpretations of Venice.
Let us turn from books, even from the classic Metamorphoses, to nature, to Devonshire, where in this year, or thereabouts, Cyrus Redding met him, to whom we owe delightful accounts of Turner in holiday mood.