The reference in the title ‘Vide Ovid' refers to his Metamorphoses, Book XIV of which contains the story of the transformation of the Apulian shepherd. In Garth's translation this became the transformation of 'Appulus', and Turner seems to have invented a mythical wife 'Apullia', to whom the swain points out the name 'Appulus' carved on the tree.

The painting was submitted for the British Institution's annual competition for a work 'proper in Point of Subject and Manner to be a Companion' to a landscape by Claude or Poussin, and is almost a copy of Lord Egremont's Claude of Jacob with Laban and his Daughters' (repr. exhibition catalogue Pictures and Works of Art from Petworth House, Wildenstein's, 1954, No.6); Thornbury even suggests that it was painted as a pendant for Lord Egremont (1862, 1, p.296). Turner has varied the architectural forms and some of the figures, but all the main elements of the composition are the same. Turner failed to win the premium because, as has been recently discovered, the picture did not arrive on time.

William Hazlitt, writing in the Morning Chronicle for 5 February 18I4, found Turner's dependence on Claude an advantage. ‘All the taste and all the imagination being borrowed, his powers of eye, hand, and memory, are equal to any thing. He attacked the figures as even worse than Claude's and found the utter want of a capacity to draw a distinct outline with the force, the depth, the fulness, and precision of this artist's eye for colour . . truly astonishing'.

There are composition sketches in the 'Woodcock Shooting' and 'Chemistry and Apuleia' sketchbooks and a drawing for the group of figures in the latter (I.B.CXXIX-41 and CXXXV-66v-68v; and CXXXV-65v and 66). The composition was engraved for the Liber Studiorum, R.72, but never published.