Based on a large pencil drawing in the British Museum (T.B.LI-N) which is in its turn based on a drawing of Lake Avernus made by Sir Richard Colt Hoare in 1786 (see No.B83). Turner did a considerable number of watercolours for Colt Hoare between 1795 and 1800 and it is possible that this was a commission; in fact John Gage has suggested (1974, pp.38-40) that Colt Hoare put forward the subject partly to replace, as it were, a Wilson in his collection which had turned out to show not Lake Avernus but Lake Nemi with Diana and Callisto.

Aeneas, in the sixth book of the Aeneid, is told by the Cumaean Sibyl that he can only enter the Underworld, where he seeks the shade of his father, with a golden bough from a sacred tree as an offering to Proserpine. A later version, practically the only case in which Turner repeated one of his finished pictures in the same scale and medium, was definitely painted for Colt Hoare in 1814 (Mr and Mrs Paul Mellon collection) and may have replaced the earlier painting in Hoare's collection, though there is no evidence that this picture ever left Turner's possession.

This picture again seems to have been painted c. 1798 and is very Wilsonian in treatment, though in this case, at Colt Hoare's suggestion so it seems, he was working for the first time in the European tradition of the historical landscape with a significant mythological or historical subject, developed in Italy by Poussin and Claude and brought to this country by Wilson. It is the first of a long series of panoramic landscapes with similar subjects (e.g. Nos.237 and 486). Lake Avernus and the distant landscape reappear in 'The Golden Bough', exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1834 and now in the Tate Gallery (Vernon Collection, 371), the story of which is connected.