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 177 verso (D08693; CXXIII 174a), recalled the death of Admiral Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Judy Egerton has described these lines as ‘impassioned’, if ‘unpolished’.2 James Hamilton has noted Turner following the lead of his fellow artist John Opie (1761–1807) as he ‘campaigns for a monument’,3 while Robert Upstone has noted that the verses between folio 177 verso (D08693; CXXIII 174a) and folio 182 verso (D08701; CXXIII 179a) clearly demonstrate ‘Turner’s deep-seated patriotism’4 during the Napoleonic Wars.

Blenheim Palace had been built near Oxford a century earlier as a reward for the Duke of Marlborough’s military victories, and was later the subject of a watercolour by Turner (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery),5 engraved in 1833 for the Picturesque Views in England and Wales. Turner goes on to suggest a prominent coastal beacon or lighthouse as a fitting monument to Nelson; he would make two watercolours in the late 1820s featuring the column of Great Yarmouth’s Nelson Monument: Yarmouth Sands (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge);6 and Great Yarmouth, Norfolk (private collection),7 engraved for England and Wales in 1829. There are studies of the Eddystone Lighthouse, in the open sea south of Plymouth, in the Vale of Heathfield sketchbook (Tate D10258, D10260; Turner Bequest CXXXVII 40, 41) and a watercolour of about 1817 (private collection).8