索多姆的毁灭

Turner was thirty when he painted this ambitious historical landscape . It shows his admiration for the grand art of the seventeenth-century painter, Nicolas Poussin, which he had studied in the Louvre during his visit to Paris in 1802.

The subject is from the Book of Genesis. It shows Lot and his two daughters (to the right) fleeing the city of Sodom as 'the Lord rained brimstone and fire' in divine retribution for the sins of its citizens. Lot's wife (on the right of the group) is being turned into a pillar of salt as she turns to look back.