Joseph Mallord William Turner

Engraved:
Etching and mezzotint by Turner and William Say, ‘Marine Dabblers’, published Turner, [?1] June 1811

Along with Juvenile Tricks and Young Anglers (see Tate D08127, D08136; Turner Bequest CXVI Z, CXVII I) this composition is one of three Liber Studiorum subjects showing boys playing. In Modern Painters, Ruskin praised them as an aspect of ‘a range of feeling which no other painter, as far as I know, can equal. He cannot, for instance, draw children at play as well as [William] Mulready; but just glean out of his works the evidence of his sympathy’.1 The anxiety of the child at the loss of a toy in the shallows foreshadows the dangers of setting out in real boats, to which the men shown in the background are accustomed.2

No direct source for the present design is known, though the theme of children playing by the sea was one addressed by Turner on numerous occasions.3 Gillian Forrester has suggested the ‘metaphorical significance’4 of the lost boat in relation to a similar incident in the foreground of the painting Dido Building Carthage; or the Rise of the Carthaginian Empire, exhibited 1815 (National Gallery, London, NG498).5 Years later, Turner appears to have remembered the present composition when he scribbled its title on a rapid sketch which may show a child launching a toy boat (Tate D22514; Turner Bequest CCXLI 46a); he showed another mortified child on the shore in his late painting The New Moon; or, ‘I’ve lost My Boat, You shan’t have Your Hoop’, exhibited 1840 (Tate N00526).6

The composition is recorded, as ‘7[:] 3 Marine Dabblers’, in the Liber Notes (2) sketchbook (Tate D12157; Turner Bequest CLIV (a) 24), in a draft schedule of the first ten parts of the Liber (D12156–D12158; CLIV (a) 23a–24a)7 dated by Finberg and Forrester to before the middle of 1808.8 It also appears later in the sketchbook, as ‘1 Dabblers’, in a list of ‘Marine’ subjects (Tate D12164; Turner Bequest CLIV (a) 27a).9

The Liber Studiorum etching and mezzotint engraving, etched by Turner and engraved by William Say, bears the publication date June 1811 and was issued to subscribers as ‘Marine Dabblers’ in part 6 (Rawlinson/Finberg nos.27–31;10 see also Tate N02941 and D08132, D08134, D08135; Turner Bequest CXVII E, G, H). Tate holds impressions of the preliminary outline etching (Tate A00968) and the published engraving (A00969). It is one of nine published Liber subjects in Turner’s ‘Marine’ category (see also Tate D08104, D08105, D08114, D08125, D08129, D08138; CXVI C, D, M, X, CXVII B, K).