Ovid in his Poems of Exile (The Tristia, Ex Ponto, and Ibis with a hyper-linked in-depth index – A.S. Kline's Poetry In Translation) describes his domicile of exile as bleak and desolate. In fact, Tomi at the Black Sea (Wikipdia, handle with care) was a Greek colony dating back to 500 BCE, with amphitheatre and all. But he also writes about the Scythians in an ethnographic way. I found two paintings online associated with Ovid in his exile, today's Romanian Constanţa, covering both aspects:
Ovid Banished from Rome (painting - oil on canvas) by William Turner, 1838, (in a private collection), on Wikimedia Commons, shows a Greek city.
And there is Ovid among the Scythians by Eugène Delacroix, 1859, at the National Gallery of Art in London, albeit under copyright, so you have to click on the above link. A very similar version of the Delacroix painting, of 1862, was acquired in March of this year by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
"The Metropolitan Museum has acquired an 1862 Delacroix painting in honor of departing director Philippe de Montebello, reports the New York Times. Ovid Among the Scythians was purchased from a Swiss private collection with funds from trustee Jayne Wrightsman and is the only late painting by the French artist in the Met's collection. It depicts a scene from Ovid's exile in Tomis and has been hung below Portrait of Madame Henri François Riesener (Félicité Longrois) (1835), another Delacroix donated by Wrightsman in 1995. (Artifo, March 14)."
JSTOR (limited access) has two related articles:
Delacroix's 'Ovid in exile'
Author(s): Henri Loyrette, Source: The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 137, No. 1111 (Oct., 1995), pp. 682-683. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/886701.
Turner's 'Cicero at His Villa'
Author(s): William Chubb, Source: The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 123, No. 940 (Jul., 1981), pp. 417-421. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/880398.
