Joseph Mallord William Turner

The whole page is taken up with the following lines of verse:

Interspersed with drawings and the printed pages of Coltman’s British Itinerary, sixty-nine pages of this sketchbook are given over wholly or partly to these verses which Turner intended as a commentary for publication with the Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England which he sketched on the 1811 West Country tour (see the introduction to the sketchbook). The first lines are on folio 18 verso (D08396), and the last on folio 207 verso (D08736; CXXIII 204a).

The previous passage, on folio 64 verso (D08485; CXXIII 61a), ends with a reference to the dangerous waters off Portland Bill, at the southern tip of Dorset’s Isle of Portland, known as the ‘race’, to which the first line here refers. Lindsay, and Wilton and Turner, following Thornbury, give the third word of the fifth line as ‘barren’ (which Lindsay qualifies as ‘useless’), but a ‘useful barrier’ appears intended in what is surely a description of Chesil Beach, the steep pebble bank and beach running north-west, in a well-known vista from the heights at the north end of Portland, eighteen miles towards West Bay, enclosing the Fleet lagoon west of Weymouth. Turner calls the latter ‘Melcombe’, from Melcombe Regis, the district along the coast north-east of the town centre. There are studies in and around Weymouth in the Corfe to Dartmouth sketchbook (Tate D08835, D08836; Turner Bequest CXXIV 24, 25) and on the recto and verso of folio 44 of the present book (D08445, D08446).