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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1836-47 Modern painter > Venice, Austria and Southern Germany ... > Venice: The Lagoon > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Inscription by Turner: A Draft of Poetry ?1840

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Inscription by Turner: A Draft of Poetry’ ?1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Inscription by Turner: A Draft of Poetry ?1840
D40182
Pencil on white wove paper, 192 x 280 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil with lines of poetry at top (see main catalogue entry)
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The watercolour on the recto, Tate D36192 (Turner Bequest CCCLXIV 334), is a moonlit view of the Lagoon near Venice, associated with Turner’s 1840 visit. This side was used for neat but partly illegible lines of what appear to be related poetry, not recorded in Finberg’s 1909 Inventory1 and first noted by Martin Butlin as ‘about the moon’:2
Now [?from a[...] L[...]
thrills [...]
as the Moon [?descends] yet Venice gleams of many winking lights
and like the darkening sails when [?she] wanes
This reading, informed largely by those of Andrew Wilton and Ian Warrell,3 is somewhat tentative, even in terms of some of the unqualified words. Warrell has noted that it ‘hints at [Turner’s] sensory engagement with the way Venice was transformed by different transient effects’,4 not only in visual terms.
Elsewhere in this grouping, a sunset Lagoon scene, Tate D32162 (Turner Bequest CCCXVI 25), has similarly fragmentary descriptive verse written on the back (D40157); for a wider discussion of poetry in relation to Turner’s Venetian subjects, see the Introduction to this subsection.
1
See A.J. Finberg, A Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest, London 1909, vol.II, p.1202.
2
Butlin 1962, p.60.
3
Wilton 1975, p.150, Wilton and Lyles 1993, p.310, Warrell 2003, p.236.
4
Warrell 2003, p.140.
Technical notes:
There is some warm brown rubbing or offsetting at the left. See under the recto (D36192) for the relationship of this sheet to numerous others used for Venetian subjects around 1840.

Matthew Imms
September 2018

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Inscription by Turner: A Draft of Poetry ?1840 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, September 2018, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2019, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-inscription-by-turner-a-draft-of-poetry-r1196464, accessed 22 July 2024.