Turner’s writing is in pencil (largely illegible) and ink, the latter reading approximately:
The high rain mill that cheats the traind eye
The bursting spire that cheers our youthful day
Warms in our hearts by recollection plays
and hope ...[with a in further sway inserted]
This version differs slightly from the reading given by Rosalind Mallord Turner in the 1990 Tate catalogue.
The others inscriptions are by the Executors of the Bequest: ‘No 303 Contains 32 Leaves. | Pencil sketches Pen and Ink’; and signed by Henry Scott Trimmer and Charles Turner in ink ‘H.S. Trimmer’ and ‘C. Turner’ and in pencil by Charles Lock Eastlake and John Prescott Knight ‘C.L.E.’ and ‘JPK’
There may also be traces of a pencil sketch of a landscape, not now recognisable.
David Blayney Brown
July 2010