The whole page is taken up with the following verse:
Of love when absent rankling at the heart
[...]
She tended oft the kine and to the mart
Bore all the efforts of her father’s art
And homeward as she bore the needfull pence
Would loiter careless on or ask [?‘taken’ inserted above] thro mere <[?pence]> pretence
To youth much michief [sic] for maturely grown
1The lines are written in ink over a draft in pencil, with four largely illegible lines (the second to the fifth, marked above by a single ellipsis) left in pencil only. Not given in Lindsay or Wilton and Turner, they are transcribed tentatively by Thornbury:
Moreover (?) the ...
No church and meads in (?) ... as the road (?)
Or anxious shivered in (?) ... bands (?)
And longed (?) ... on the oozy sands (?).
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 73 verso (
D08503; CXXIII 70a), concerns the trials and tribulations of love, which seems to have prompted Turner, whether from imagination or embroidering a local West Country anecdote or report, to compose this narrative of an innocent West Country cow-girl encountering soldiers guarding the coast during the Napoleonic Wars, which continues on folio 80 verso (
D08516; CXXIII 77a) and concludes on folio 83 verso (
D08520; CXXIII 80a). John Gage has characterised it as a ‘particularly poignant episode’, and a catastrophic development from
Southern Coast images of women ‘busy while the menfolk, often, of course, on leave from active service, take their ease’,
2 such as the watercolour
Plymouth, with Mount Batten of about 1816 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London).
3
