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

Turner’s main inscription is possibly ‘praesidium et dulce decus’, from the opening lines of the Roman poet Horace’s address to Maecenas, his famous patron: ‘Maecenas atavis edite regibus, | o et praesidium et dulce decus meum’1 (‘Maecenas, born of monarch ancestors, | The shield at once and glory of my life!’).2 In his Life of Samuel Johnson, first published in 1791, Boswell had used ‘dulce decus’ (glory) in characterising Dr Johnson’s admiration of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792),3 the first President of the Royal Academy and one of Turner’s early heroes. Any connection with Turner’s apparent note of the fuller phrase remains to be established.

Below Turner’s inscription, the sketchbook’s original schedule number is endorsed by Henry Scott Trimmer, Charles Lock Eastlake and John Prescott Knight, starting above the centre of the page in ink, ‘N^o 356 | 17 pencil sketches – | H.S Trimmer’, and initialled in pencil ‘C.L.E’ and ‘JPK’ below.