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

The recto of this sheet shows a Scene on the French Coast (Tate D08104; Turner Bequest CXVI C), one of Turner’s early studies for the Liber Studiorum; the sheet is not watermarked, but its batch has been identified as ‘1794 | J WHATMAN’.1 The whimsical poem on its verso is unrelated. Finberg imagined it might have been ‘discovered in a book or magazine’ while staying with W.F. Wells and his family at Knockholt – where Turner was said to have begun work on the Liber designs in 1806 (see general Liber introduction) – since ‘there lingers about it a faint echo of those scenes of “fun and merriment” which one of Turner’s young playmates recalled in after years.’2 Finberg and Lindsay later gave more psychological interpretations, respectively: ‘The verses deal with the perils of premature ambition; their moral is that pride will have a fall, or that it is a mistake to be in too great a hurry to o’ertop your neighbours’;3 ‘We can perhaps read some fears or doubts about the project ... “How near is pride to earth allied.”’4

Finberg,5 Lindsay6 and Rosalind Turner (see below) each give slightly different transcriptions. The following reading is prompted by those previously published (the beginnings of some lines are now partly obscured by the edge of the modern backing sheet):

This should be compared with Rosalind Turner’s reading:

The poem has been set to music by the British composer Ivan Moseley, as ‘Poplars in disgrace’, one of Three Turner Fragments for mixed choir (2001);8 the others are ‘Rainy morning, no fishing’ from the Frittlewell sketchbook (Tate D07756; Turner Bequest CXII, inside back cover)9 and ‘Eolian Harp’ from p.31 of Turner’s Verse Book (private collection).10