The whole page is taken up with the following notes:
[?so] small, leaving the world to darkness | that the power of shade increases as the | power of casting shadows fail [?and are] | but faintly traced while as Young whose | observation seems apposite expresses
“As some high tower or lofty mountain brow
Retains the sun illustrious from its hight
While damp and darkness [?cloud] the spacious vale
and in the rising orb the eye is sensible of | discerning half the circle before it can detect | any positive shadow form’d, and the distant | objects that intervene cannot be found to | form any lines upon the part illumin’d | untill the whole O has risen the hight | is evidently more defined and colors any | object it strikes upon and consequently leave | that in shadow whose surface is no opposed | to the orb, yet the positive shadow casts | not untill the greatest part of the O is visible
This passage follows on from folio 88 verso (
D07505) and continues on the recto of the present leaf (
D07502). It is part of a sequence beginning on folio 91 verso (
D07511), and running back to folio 82 verso (
D07493). John Gage has discussed these provisional notes (not developed in the perspective lectures) as an example of Turner’s close observation of natural phenomena,
1 in this case the question of sunlight travelling in parallel lines or otherwise, responding to a chapter of
The Art of Painting by Gérard de Lairesse (1640–1711), in the English translation by John Frederick Frisch (London 1738 and later editions).
2 See under
D07511 for a discussion of Lairesse’s text. Maurice Davies has registered Turner’s notes as ‘on light and shadow’, as part of a longer sequence running back to folio 72 verso (
D07473).
3Turner’s first line may be an echo of Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (lines 3–4): ‘The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, | And leaves the world to darkness and to me’. He then quotes from memory or adapts a passage near the end of ‘Night II’ of The Complaint, by Edward Young:
