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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > Sandycombe Lodge c.1808-12 > Windmill and Lock Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Inscription by Turner: A Draft of Poetry on Pope's Villa c.1808-11

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Inscription by Turner: A Draft of Poetry on Pope's Villa’ c.1808-11
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 4 Recto:
Inscription by Turner: A Draft of Poetry on Pope’s Villa circa 1808–11
D07964
Turner Bequest CXIV 4
Pencil on white wove paper, 87 x 117 mm
Part watermark ‘J What | 180’
Inscribed by Turner in pencil (see main catalogue entry)
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘4’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CXIV – 4’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Almost the whole page is taken up with poetry:
To thee whose Villa once this shore along
Hath Thames reechoed to thy Pas [blank] song
Remembering [?cheering M]
Yet demolition caught my wan eyes
Which bid it yet to live in various dyes
Rembring [?cheering] to days of sunny cheer
And asks this Witnes to thy men bear
and the remorse from its partin home
Stands here to Pope a monumental Stone1
The passage refers to the 1807 demolition of the house by the River Thames once owned by the poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744), which Turner lamented in his oil of Pope’s Villa at Twickenham, exhibited at his gallery in 1808 (private collection).2 The artist had composed poetry on the subject at about the same time in his ‘Verse Book’3 and may have returned to it here in ‘gently pastoral and elegiac’ mood4 in anticipation of the publication of an engraving from the painting in 1811.5 As Wilton and Turner suggest, ‘Pas’ presumably indicates ‘Pastoral’ and ‘Rembring’ ‘Remembering’.6 There is a longer variant on folio 77 recto (D08064).

Matthew Imms
January 2012

1
See Wilton and Turner 1990, p.169 (transcription, followed here with slight variations).
2
Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner, revised ed., New Haven and London 1984, pp.55–6 no.72, pl.82 (colour).
3
See Wilton and Turner 1990, pp.50–1, 129–30, 150 (transcription).
4
Ibid., p.129.
5
Ibid., p.50.
6
Ibid., p.169.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Inscription by Turner: A Draft of Poetry on Pope’s Villa c.1808–11 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, January 2012, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-inscription-by-turner-a-draft-of-poetry-on-popes-villa-r1134740, accessed 23 April 2024.