If you turn to the illustration you will see at once that the artist has not represented the natural landscape. The very title, _Dido Building Carthage_, shows the classic influence. The subject is taken from Virgil’s Æneid, Book I, line 420. Turner, the great English artist, who in 1815 painted this picture, had never seen Carthage; nor had he ever seen any spot on earth like the one represented here. What he had seen was the work of Claude Lorrain, a French artist of the Seventeenth Century, who lived in Italy and invented this kind of landscape. Turner himself preferred to paint the natural landscape; but, since the people of his own day admired the _classic_ landscape of Claude and his followers, he wished to prove that he also could paint like Claude, if he chose; and as well as the French artist. Therefore, when he died, he left this picture and another classic landscape, _The Sun rising in a Mist_ to the National Gallery, on condition that they should be hung alongside of two by Claude Lorrain. So, while studying this picture we are really studying the principles on which Claude built up the _classic_ landscape, and on which his followers worked for nearly two hundred years, until the love of nature won out and the _naturalistic_ landscape took its place.