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

For the longer draft poems to which Turner’s verses belong, see Introduction to the sketchbook. Finberg did not transcribe the verses on this leaf, and the reading given here was first made by Rosalind Mallord Turner for the 1990 Tate exhibition:

Obliquely, Turner refers to Alexander Pope’s Dunciad, Book II, in which the actress and author Eliza Haywood appears among the dunces, fêted by booksellers despite having nothing original to say. Notorious for scandalous romances, some of which contained thinly disguised portraits of public figures, Haywood is offered as first prize in a urinating competition (the second is a chamber pot). Turner adopts Pope’s description of her as ‘vacuous’. In a further note Pope had called her a ‘shameless scribbler’.

There is another, shorter version of these lines, without the mention of Haywood, on folio 41 (D06800) and a third inside the back cover of the Frittlewell sketchbook (Tate D07756; Turner Bequest CXII), where they are said to be ‘Written at Purley on the Thame[s] | Rainy morning – no fishing’.

Also on this leaf is a sketch in pencil, currently unidentified but perhaps related to the lamprey-fishing subject on folio 32 verso (D06783).