J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

The page is taken up with lines of verse. Most commentators have followed Finberg’s patchy transcription of the first, fifth, tenth and eleventh lines (‘“Where is the star which shone at ... Eve” – | “The gleaming star of Ever ...” – | “The first pale Star of Eve ere Twylight [sic] comes | Struggles with ...”’) in full or in part.1

John Gage usefully added ‘the little life of day’, as if part of the last line,2 although the whole phrase is actually an addendum, continuing or inserted to the right of line seven; Judy Egerton picked out a few further key words, as quoted below.3 The fuller transcription attempted here is very tentative, and some words could be read differently, although the overall sense is clear:

With the page turned vertically, Turner wrote a further couplet along the outer edge:

There are briefer related passages on folios 3 recto and 4 verso (D22155, D22157), and longer ones on folios 70 recto and verso opposite (D22277, D22278; Turner Bequest CCXXXIX 69, 69a). A virtually illegible passage on folio 20 verso (D22186) may also begin ‘Lo Twilight’ (or ‘Twylight’). It is unusual to find such lengthy drafts in a sketchbook from this stage of Turner’s career,4 although they are characteristically repetitious and unresolved; most of his poetry was composed some two decades or more previously, although he continued to accompany his paintings with fragmentary lines from his ‘M.S. Fallacies of Hope’ in Royal Academy exhibition catalogues until the end of his career.5

As Egerton observes, ‘Turner makes one attempt after another to find poetic expression for an inevitable sequence common enough in nature: the sequence in which the “pale” evening star appears with its “mild” light (if “mild” is indeed decipherable) at twilight, and briefly “gleams” before its light is overtaken by the “powerful ray” of (presumably) the moon.’6 She notes that he was ‘deeply interested in such transitional moments’, later slightly adapting Lord Byron’s ‘The moon is up and yet it is not night – | Sunset divides the sky with her ...’7 when exhibiting Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino in 1839 (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles);8 he used the couplet again in a slightly different form for Approach to Venice in 1844 (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC).9

The lines here were first tentatively linked by Finberg10 to the unfinished painting The Evening Star, of about 1830 (Turner Bequest, National Gallery, London),11 a near-empty twilight beach scene, and later commentators have relayed this idea with varying degrees of agreement.12 Gage proposed that Venus, the Evening Star, a figure subject exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1828 by William Etty (1787–1849), might have set Turner thinking on the theme.13 Introducing a certain circularity to the discussion, Egerton has suggested that the title of his unfinished, unexhibited painting ‘is unlikely to be Turner’s’, and ‘seems to have been invented for it in 1906’, possibly even at Finberg’s ‘inspired suggestion’ after deciphering these verses.14 At any event, if the lines do relate to Turner’s so-called ‘Evening Star’ canvas, they are ‘characteristic of his longing to find poetic expression for what he had, perhaps at the same time, perfectly caught in paint’.15