John Ruskin described The Golden Bough as a sequel to Turner's 1823 painting The Bay of Baiae, which is based on the myth of Apollo and the Cumaean Sibyl.

[1] The painting depicts a scene from book VI of the ancient Roman epic Aeneid by Virgil.

The Sibyl of Cumae tells him that he needs to offer a golden bough from a sacred tree to Proserpine in order to enter.

The scene, suffused with the golden glow of imagination in which the divine mind of Turner steeped and transfigured even the fairest natural landscape, is a dream-like vision of the little woodland lake of Nemi, "Diana's Mirror," as it was called by the ancients.

No one who has seen that calm water, lapped in a green hollow of the Alban hills, can ever forget it.