"Regulus" was createded in 1828 and reworked in 1837. Regulus was a Roman general who was captured by the Carthaginians. They sent him back to Rome to negotiate the release of Carthaginian prisoners. When he returned to Carthaginian, having failed his mission, he was punished by having his eyelids removed. Turner’s blinding, light-filled canvas makes manifest Regulus’s plight.

Turner went to Rome for the second time in 1828, leaving England in August and arriving in October; he stayed until early January 1829, and was back in England in February.

Turner first exhibited this painting in Rome in 1828. His audience would have recognised its echoes of a famous seaport by the seventeenth-century painter, Claude Lorrain, in the Uffizzi gallery in Florence. Turner clearly wanted to show himself as heir to the tradition of landscape painting begun by Claude.