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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > Perspective lectures c.1809-28 > Perspective Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Inscription by Turner: Notes on Painting in Relation to Poetry c.1809

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Inscription by Turner: Notes on Painting in Relation to Poetry’ c.1809
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 51 Verso:
Inscription by Turner: Notes on Painting in Relation to Poetry circa 1809
D07444
Turner Bequest CVIII 51a
Pen and ink on white wove paper, 115 x 88 mm
Inscribed by Turner in ink (see main catalogue entry)
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The whole page is taken up with the following notes:
Poets thought tho his means are different | he [?bears] the censure with the power of | redemption while he is confined to the | local contra[...] of his art and if he | is happy he is considerd only secondarily | as endeavouring to give to the most vulgar | age what has been admitted to be beautiful | in the Poet, by very different means when | failure he meets disgrace either as <[?the]> | defficient in the mechanical excellencies | or not feeling his author or not conveying | his sentiment either has made a | sorry choice but has his sentiments | of the Poets sentiments are his own and | has he must embody them by known | effects of nature he should be allowd | to consider’d equal in sintiments and1
These notes are part of a sequence beginning at folio 53 verso (see entry for D07448) and continuing back through the sketchbook to folio 48 verso (D07438). The previous passage is on folio 52 verso (D07446), and the next on folio 50 verso (D07442), continuing in mid-sentence at each end.
Wilton and Turner read the second word of the second line as ‘hears’, and the second of the fourth as ‘contrarieties’, although Turner’s word does not seem long enough. In his partial transcription, Jerrold Ziff reads ‘excellencies’ as ‘execution’. Either seems plausible, but his reading of the penultimate word as ‘his merits’ appears less likely.2

Matthew Imms
June 2008

1
See Wilton and Turner 1990, p.137 (transcription, followed here with slight variations).
2
Ziff 1964, p.197.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Inscription by Turner: Notes on Painting in Relation to Poetry c.1809 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, June 2008, 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-notes-on-painting-in-relation-to-r1136640, accessed 21 September 2024.