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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > Work for Earls Egremont and Lonsdale ... > Petworth Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Banks of the River Arun 1809

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Banks of the River Arun’ 1809
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Banks of the River Arun 1809
D07514
Turner Bequest CIX 3
Pencil on white wove paper, 225 x 370 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil (see main catalogue entry) bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CIX 3’ bottom right corner
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Turner names the drawing ‘Banks of Arun’ on the verso (D40276). For another view of the Arun, with fishermen, from the same sketchbook see D07513; Turner Bequest CIX 2.
The verses, transcribed by Rosalind Mallord Turner for the 1992 Tate exhibition, are as follows:
A gleam so hopeful shone on Arun[‘s] reed strewn shore
When Colin by the sedgy bank did thoughtful roam
Yon char[ming] ray of sunshine born
That memory so fair a thought
Transient as the dew upon the thorn
That mark[s] the thorn [?apple] so finely wrought
When his mortal ray
Wilton relates this and a further, similar extract on the verso to pastoral stanzas written by Turner in his Verse Book (private collection) in connection with the picture Thomson’s Aeolian Harp (Manchester Art Gallery),1 a tribute to the poet James Thomson exhibited in 1809. Here, Turner envisions the banks of ‘sedgy’Arun roamed by one ‘Colin’, presumably the Chichester poet William Collins whose Ode on the Death of Mr Thomson (1749) had been an inspiration for the picture. In the contemporary Hastings sketchbook (Tate D07745; Turner Bequest CXI 95), the Arun is associated with the youth of Thomas Otway, author of the tragedy Venice Preserv’d (1682). Wilton comments on Turner’s habitual association of river scenery with poets and his own ‘meditative verse’. The poetic tastes and large library of Turner’s Sussex host, the Earl of Egremont, may have prompted the reflections here.

David Blayney Brown
August 2009

1
Butlin and Joll 1984, pp.64–5 no.86 (pl.96).

How to cite

David Blayney Brown, ‘Banks of the River Arun 1809 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, August 2009, 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-banks-of-the-river-arun-r1135628, accessed 16 April 2024.