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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > Liber Studiorum notes c.1807-19 > Aesacus and Hesperie Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Inscription by Turner: Draft of a Note Concerning a Property Dispute c.1819

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Inscription by Turner: Draft of a Note Concerning a Property Dispute’ c.1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 26 Verso:
Inscription by Turner: Draft of a Note Concerning a Property Dispute c.1819
D13791
Turner Bequest CLXIX 26a
Pencil on white wove paper, 119 x 87 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil (see main catalogue entry)
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The whole page is taken up with the following note:
May it please | [...] | <that havg> [...] | [...] | of £ [blank] – for | <...> | the same for | [blank] years – [?& I] | you was in hopes
The text is heavily revised, with the lines towards the beginning scrawled, overlapping and crossed through so as to be effectively illegible. Turner wrote it with the page turned vertically, continued straight onto folio 27 recto opposite (D13792), and from there onto folios 27 verso and 28 recto (D13793, D13794). For clarity, the whole four-page passage is set out here:
May it please [...] <that havg> [...] of £ [blank] – for <...> the same for [blank] years – [?& I] you was in hopes of havg peaceable possession – but <...> found a Tenant named Martha [?Friday] in possession of part of the [?premises] who had a kind of forcible possession I was obliged to Eject her <at> great loss that on that occasion I have incurred an expense of £ [blank] besides the loss of rent amounting to £ [blank]
The words appear hastily and forcefully written, perhaps in the heat of the moment as a draft of a legal appeal following the apparent eviction of the intransigent woman – which Jack Lindsay (without citing this first page of the note) refers to succinctly as ‘Tenant trouble’.1 Turner came to own a small but varied portfolio of property and land scattered around London and the Home Counties.2

Matthew Imms
September 2013

1
Jack Lindsay, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work: A Critical Biography, London 1966, p.243 note 1.
2
Summarised in John Gage, J.M.W. Turner: ‘A Wonderful Range of Mind’, New Haven and London 1987, p.171.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Inscription by Turner: Draft of a Note Concerning a Property Dispute c.1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, September 2013, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, September 2014, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-inscription-by-turner-draft-of-a-note-concerning-a-property-r1147514, accessed 25 April 2024.