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

These verses were first transcribed by Rosalind Mallord Turner, whose reading is followed here:

Turner is meditating on creativity, criticism and the transient nature of reputation, and uses as his primary image a beech tree, growing to maturity but carrying within it the seeds of its own destruction as it outgrows its own strength. This is in keeping with the organic similes for creativity favoured by Romantic artists and writers. Wilton and Mallord Turner observe the ‘personal significance’ of the theme to Turner, without elaborating on what this might be.

Turner’s career was flourishing at this period but here he strikes a troubled, pessimistic note. His thoughts seem to chime with his reflections on the poet Alexander Pope and the damage done to his memory by the demolition in 1807 of his villa at Twickenham; these included extensive commentary in verse and his picture Pope’s Villa at Twickenham, during its Dilapidation (on the London art market in 2008)1 exhibited in 1808. It is interesting that in this sketchbook the lines occur close to drawings of trees, folios 82 verso and 83 verso (D07841, D07843) and others of Petworth Park, for example folio 5 (D07761), since Turner was later to choose the park, with Petworth House and church, as the background for his subject of a beech tree threatened by woodcutters in his vignette The Beech Tree’s Petition (watercolour in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh)2 for Thomas Campbell’s Poetical Works (1837).3 The design for the vignette could be based on folios 1 and 2 (D07757, D07758), possibly also showing the park or scenery nearby. There may have been some lasting connection in Turner’s mind between these ideas and places. Elsewhere in Sussex, notably in the east of the county, swathes of old woodland had been cut down for fuel for iron-smelting and other uses, leading to a shortage of timber.4