J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

The whole page is taken up with the following notes:

This is the first passage in a series working back through the sketchbook to folio 48 verso (D07438). Andrew Wilton has described the arguments as ‘tortuously expressed’ but including ‘interesting reflections on the essential differences between the tasks of painter and poet’ and ‘dynamism in the depiction of nature’.2 The next page in the sequence is folio 52 verso (D07446).

The crabbed handwriting of the first paragraph has been transcribed rather differently by Jerrold Ziff: ‘The painter’s beauties are defineable while the poet’s are imaginary as they relate to his associations’.3 (In quoting from this page, Gerald Finley, Barry Venning and Sam Smiles have closely followed this reading,4 but Wilton and Turner’s, as largely followed in the full transcription here, seems the most likely.)

Taking his cue from his reading ‘associations’, Ziff mentions Turner’s study of Mark Akenside’s Pleasures of the Imagination (1744 and later editions); more generally, he suggests the effect on Turner’s argument of Martin Archer Shee’s 1805 Rhymes on Art, with its ‘attempts to elevate painting over poetry’.5 Finley has suggested that Turner was able to resolve this artistic dichotomy by moving from a ‘descriptive’ to a more ‘expressive’ approach, particularly in his later illustrations, where he ‘employed devices equivalent to those found in poetry’6 through symbolism.