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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > West Country 1811 > Devonshire Coast, No.1 Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Inscription by Turner: Draft of Poetry 1811

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Inscription by Turner: Draft of Poetry’ 1811
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 45 Verso:
Inscription by Turner: Draft of Poetry 1811
D08448
Turner Bequest CXXIII 45a
Inscribed by Turner in ink (see main catalogue entry) on white wove printing paper, 75 x 117 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The whole page is taken up with the following lines of verse:
The growth of family produced strife
Roused from his long content cot he went
Where oft the labour and the [?osier] bent
To form the snares for lobsters arm in mail
but man more cunning over them prevail
lured by a few sea snail and whelks a prey
That they could gather in their watery way
Caught in a w<h>icker cage not two feet wide
While the whole oceans open to the pride
Such petty profits could not life maintain1
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 43 verso (D08444), describes the village school-marm wife of the lobster-catcher pictured here in closely-observed detail by Turner, himself a keen fisherman. However, he came to an unfortunate end, as described in the conclusion of the episode on folio 48 verso (D08454).

Matthew Imms
June 2011

1
See transcriptions (followed here with slight variations) in Lindsay 1966, pp.110–11, as part of ‘The Wife of the Captured Fisherman’, section (g) of poem no.50, ‘On the Western Itinerary 1811’, Gage 1987, pp.217–18 and Wilton and Turner 1990, p.171; previously transcribed with variations in Thornbury 1862, II, p.20 and 1897, p.208.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Inscription by Turner: Draft of Poetry 1811 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, June 2011, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-inscription-by-turner-draft-of-poetry-r1136925, accessed 27 May 2025.