[2] They depict the life of the Ancient Roman poet Ovid when exiled by the Emperor Augustus to the Black Sea port of Tomis, in what was then part of Scythia and is now south-east Romania, where he spent his last eight years and wrote poems such as Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto.

[6] Henri Loyrette wrote: Low but sometimes steep mountains covered with scrubby vegetation surround a still, shallow lake, boggy at its edges; scattered huts built precariously of wood and thatch suggest a pastoral and nomadic culture.

[8] Théophile Gautier, for example, admired the painting, but ironically called the mare la femelle du cheval de Troie ("the female of the trojan horse").

[9] Maxime Du Camp was the author of the harshest criticism, calling the painting "a spectacle of irremissible decadence" and advising the painter "to return to the literary works that he loves and to the music for which he was certainly born".

[11] He also wrote a long essay on the life of an exiled poet and quoted Chateaubriand's epic Les Martyrs to evoke "the landscape, its solitude, its calm charm".