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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > Cheshire, Derbyshire, North Wales ... > Derbyshire Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner A Valley with a Town and Distant Mountains, and Verses (Inscriptions by Turner) 1808

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘A Valley with a Town and Distant Mountains, and Verses (Inscriptions by Turner)’ 1808
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 3 Verso:
A Valley with a Town and Distant Mountains, and Verses (Inscriptions by Turner) 1808
D07136
Turner Bequest CVI 3a
Pencil on white wove paper, 108 x 185 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil and ink (see main catalogue entry)
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The pencil sketch (not mentioned by Finberg), mainly of a building with a tower but not necessarily a church, is an extension of the subject on folio 4 (D07137). The location is unidentified.

For Turner’s verse, written in pencil and ink, Rosalind Mallord Turner’s reading for the 1990 Tate exhibition is largely followed here:
[in ink] Few the sweets that Autumn yields
Far roams the Bee on ...fields
Few cheerfull mornings gild the skies
But fog or Rain oer uplands flies
The long drawn Vale where smiling ether glowd
Show’d every stream that slowly glittering flow’d
[two illegible lines in pencil]
In sallow weeds the deluge rampage lies
[in pencil] The long lost age with early fondness trace
Each [?] or spin amid the chequered space
[in ink]The driving rain denies the eye to trace
The Pine clad height or [denies the view]
This is another attempt at the opening stanzas of a poem about autumn, following two other versions on folio 2 verso of the sketchbook (D07134).

David Blayney Brown
July 2010

How to cite

David Blayney Brown, ‘A Valley with a Town and Distant Mountains, and Verses (Inscriptions by Turner) 1808 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, July 2010, 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-a-valley-with-a-town-and-distant-mountains-and-verses-r1129562, accessed 25 April 2024.