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

From this leaf on to the inside back cover of the sketchbook, Turner has jotted passages for a longer poem lamenting the demolition in 1807 of the poet Alexander Pope’s villa at Twickenham; for the demolition, see Introductions to this sketchbook and to the River sketchbook (Tate D05961–D06071; D40650–D40654; Turner Bequest XCVI) which contains similar verses. All these contributed to the more developed poem on the same theme in Turner’s Verse Book (private collection).1 Not transcribed by Finberg, who found them illegible, these drafts were in large part deciphered by Rosalind Mallord Turner for the 1990 Tate catalogue; her readings are retained here. The text on this leaf reads:

Typically, Turner alludes to pastoral mythology and literary traditions which, through Pope and James Thomson especially, had become associated with Thames scenery. Here, Colin Clout is the courting shepherd of Edmund Spenser’s Shephearde’s Calendar (1579). ‘B’ is presumably the maiden who appears variously in Turner’s poetry as ‘Bloz’ or ‘Bloss’; see also folios 86 verso and inside back cover (D06711, D06618).