The second of the large finished pictures resulting from Turner's first visit to Italy, exhibited two years after 'Rome from the Vatican' with the line: 'Waft me to sunny Baiæ's shore'. The Latin inscription on the picture comes from Horace's Ode To Calliope and alludes to the poet's delight in the waters of Baiae. Though the district had been painted by Wilson this is the first time it had been used for a subject picture. Apollo granted Deiphobe, the Cumeen Sibyl, that she should live as many years as she held grains of sand in her hand, but she failed to ask for perpetual youth and wasted away until only her voice was left (Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book XIV). Baiae had been renowned for its luxury under the Romans and, as John Gage has pointed out (1974, pp.44-7), Turner probably followed his early patron Colt Hoare in drawing the lesson of its decline through profligacy and degeneracy. While the white rabbit alludes to Venus, to whom one of the local temples was dedicated, the snake is symbolic of the latent evil.

Turner visited Baiae from Naples in 1819 and there are many drawings in the 'Gandolfo to Naples and Pompeii, Amalfi, Sorrento and Herculaneum' sketchbooks, including one in the former of the same view as the picture (T.B.CLXXXIV-82v and 83; see also CLXXXV). In this picture the Claudian panorama that had characterised so many of Turner's previous landscapes is composed in flowing curves rather than the more distinct zones and linear stresses of the earlier examples.

The adjective almost universally applied to this picture by the critics was 'gorgeous'. The writer in the European Magazine for May 1823 was 'much annoyed by a cold-blooded critic… who observed that it was not natural. Natural! No, not in his limited and purblind view of nature. But perfectly natural to the man who is capable of appreciating the value of a practical concentration of all that nature occasionally and partially discloses of the rich, the glowing and the splendid'. According to the Repository of Arts for June 1823 'Mr Turner's answer, and perhaps a sufficient one' to the 'somewhat monotonous effect produced by the unclouded richness of the landscape … may be, that he has painted the landscape as nature and the poets have given it'. The Literary Gazette, in its second notice of the picture on 17 May 1823, had a slightly different answer: The seductive influence of colours, and the necessity of painting up to the standard of an exhibition, where the spread of gold is more than that of canvas, will prevent, if it does not annihilate, the study of nature ... Though we have no eye for criticism on this splendid piece, it is only when considered as a vision, or a sketch, or as a variety in a large collection,in one word, it is not painting.'