The theme of the riders of the Apocalypse was a common one among the more imaginative of British neoclassical artists in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for example Benjamin West, John Hamilton Mortimer, P. J. de Loutherbourg and William Blake. Turner, typically, transforms it into a vision of cloud and fire, a manifestation of the destructive power of nature. Lawrence Gowing suggests that it may have been inspired by the death of Turner's father in 1829 (1966, p.27), and it also reflects Turner's renewed interest in figure paintings about this time. The rubbing and scratching away of the wet paint to produce special textures parallels that in some of the Cowes sketches of 1827 (see Nos.315 and 318) and 'Rocky Bay with Figures' of c.1830 (No.483).