Although Turner did not die until 19 December 1851, this was the last year in which he exhibited. As if to make amends for the thin showing of the previous three years he sent in a group of four pictures devoted to Aeneas' stay at Carthage, tempted by love for Dido to resist the destiny that called him to Italy. All were accompanied by verses from the Fallacies of Hope, those for this picture being :

Beneath the morning mist, Mercury waited to tell him of his neglected fleet.

Of the other three pictures 'Eneas relating his story to Dido' is said to have perished nearly sixty years ago, while 'The Visit to the Tomb' and 'The Departure of the Fleet' are at the Tate Gallery. All the compositions follow much the same pattern with figures crowded on steep banks on either side of a brightly illuminated centre in which the sun is drawn, as it were, to the surface of the picture to dominate the whole scene. They may well have been worked up over delicate, watercolour-like lay-ins of the character of 'Sunrise with a Ship between Headlands' and 'Norham Castle'. The colours on the whole lack Turner's usual exquisite balance and are unnaturally hot and foxy, though this example escapes this defect.

Indeed, the Athenaeum for 18 May 1850 picked out 'Mercury sent to admonish Aneas' as 'exquisite for delicacy and refinement'. The group as a whole were characterised as 'full of combinations of forms of richest fancy and of colours of most dazzling hue' ', though 'they must be approached no nearer than to the spot at which the general effect can be judged of. ... They must be looked on as great pictorial schemes, abounding in rich stores of Nature and deductions from Art,great poetical ideas, in fact, the principles of which the student will do well to investigate. The practise which spurns at the expression of details it will be prudent for him to avoid.' The Spectator for 4 May was less complimentary, talking of 'a splendid perplexity, respecting which the name would convey no information to the reader; with a companion equally brilliant to the eye and dark to the understanding' and saying of the Fallacies of Hope, 'the said fallacy being, any hope of understanding what the picture means'.