Frontispiece to Liber Studiorum

Turner was the dominant figure of British landscape painting in the early 1800s. He refined and publicized his ideas about the genre in the Liber Studiorum, or Book of Studies, a series of 70 prints published in 14 installments between 1807 and 1819. Advertising his artistic range, Turner categorized the prints as historical, mountainous, pastoral, marine, and architectural.

A prominent subject in the architectural prints is ruins. Like other artists of his generation, Turner was fascinated by the awesome and terrifying power of nature to overwhelm human efforts to establish order and structure. This theme is already evident in the frontispiece to the series, in the Gothic arcade in the background and the fallen architectural fragment on the right.

Some 19th-century critics understood this image to be deeply pessimistic and symbolic of the decay of European civilization. Others saw cause for optimism, interpreting the flourishing of nature as a sign of the self-regenerating potential of art.