Joseph Mallord William Turner A Garden, for Rogers's 'Poems' c.1830-2
Joseph Mallord William Turner,
A Garden, for Rogers's 'Poems'
c.1830-2
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
A Garden, for Rogers’s ‘Poems’ circa 1830–2
D27679
Turner Bequest CCLXXX 162
Turner Bequest CCLXXX 162
Watercolour and gouache, approximately 125 x 130 mm on white wove paper, 230 x 303 mm
Stamped in black ‘CCLXXX 162’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCLXXX 162’ bottom right
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Exhibition history
1904
National Gallery, London, various dates to at least 1904 (220).
1975
Turner and the Poets: Engravings and Watercolours from his Later Period, Marble Hill House, Twickenham, April–June 1975, University of East Anglia, Norwich, June–July 1975, Central Art Gallery, Wolverhampton, July–August 1975 (IX).
1993
Turner’s Vignettes, Tate Gallery, London, September 1993–February 1994 (10, reproduced).
2009
Water Colours: From the Source to the Sea, Tate Britain, London, August 2009–July 2010 (no catalogue).
References
1903
E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), Library Edition: The Works of John Ruskin: Volume I: Early Prose Writings 1834–1843, London 1903, pp.233, 244.
1904
E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), Library Edition: The Works of John Ruskin: Volume XIII: Turner: The Harbours of England; Catalogues and Notes, London 1904, pp.380–1.
1906
E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), Library Edition: The Works of John Ruskin: Volume XXI: The Ruskin Art Collection at Oxford, London 1906, p.214.
1906
E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), Library Edition: The Works of John Ruskin: Volume XXII: Lectures on Landscape; Michelangelo; Tintoret, London 1906, p.378.
1909
A.J. Finberg, A Complete Inventory of the Drawings in the Turner Bequest, London 1909, vol.II, p.901, as ‘Garden. Rogers’s “Poems”’.
1966
Adele Holcomb, ‘J.M.W. Turner’s Illustrations to the Poets’, unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of California, Los Angeles 1966, p.81, reproduced fig.39.
1975
Mordechai Omer, Turner and the Poets: Engravings and Watercolours from his Later Period, exhibition catalogue, Marble Hill House, Twickenham 1975, [pp.23–24].
1979
Andrew Wilton, The Life and Work of J.M.W. Turner, Fribourg 1979, p.440 no.1177, reproduced.
1993
Jan Piggott, Turner’s Vignettes, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1993, pp.40–1, 82 no.10, 97, reproduced.
The Garden was engraved by William Miller and published as the frontispiece for the 1834 edition of Rogers’s Poems.1 It appears opposite the title page for the first poem, ‘The Pleasures of Memory’.2 The image shows an Italianate garden, occupied only by a young boy and a hunched old man. Jan Piggott has described the scene as an amalgam of the formal gardens that Turner had visited during his tours of Italy.3 These include the gardens at the Villa Lante at Bagnaia, the Villa d’Este, and the Palazzino at Caprarola, as well as the Boboli Gardens, all of which Turner had sketched first-hand during his visits to Italy in 1819 and 1828.4 Piggott has also observed that the Italian themed subject, as well as specific features of the composition such as the arcades, statuary, potted trees, and cypress trees, allude to the final illustration in Rogers’s Italy, A Farewell (see Tate, D27667; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 150), which Turner had just finished.5 This visual pairing, along with the similar design of the two volumes, reinforces the link between Poems and Italy.
Turner’s illustration complements a quote by the fourteenth-century Italian poet, Petrarch, which Rogers includes as the epigraph to his own poem ‘The Pleasures of Memory’:
Dolce sentier, .......
Colle, che mi piacesti,....
Ov’ ancor per usanza Amor mi mena;
Ben riconosco in voi l’usate forme,
Non, lasso, in me.6
Colle, che mi piacesti,....
Ov’ ancor per usanza Amor mi mena;
Ben riconosco in voi l’usate forme,
Non, lasso, in me.6
(Sweet path,
Hill, that once I counted dear
Where, as of old, Love doth entrice me still
You are not changed whom I remember well
But I am otherwise.)7
Hill, that once I counted dear
Where, as of old, Love doth entrice me still
You are not changed whom I remember well
But I am otherwise.)7
The hunched old man and the young boy in the vignette allude to the theme of revisiting the sites of one’s youth raised in both Petrarch’s and Rogers’s poem. However, as Jan Piggott has pointed out the illustration also bears a clear relationship with several passages in the next poem in the book, ‘Human Life’, in which Rogers describes an ‘aged pilgrim’ and a boy who ‘chases the bright butterfly.’8
On a touched proof of the printed version of The Garden (University College London), Turner gave his engraver, William Miller, clear instructions regarding the final appearance of the vignette now rendered in black and white:
Burnish away the sharp lines of the water and fill in with close work all the distance and soften away the whole of the sky excepting the sun and [?up] [...] cloud – the water much lighter and only a little sharper at the top thru’ the cloud on the right-hand in short all the centre wants filling in drypoint, keeping it free from hardness yet [?preserving] a mass of light and brightness to the jet of water where I have marked to help you and to take away the too positive lines.9
Miller’s rendering won special praise from Ruskin, who described the engraving as ‘consummate in its use of every possible artifice of delicate line’.10
There is one preliminary study for the vignette (see Tate D27534; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 17).
W.G. Rawlinson, The Engraved Work of J.M.W. Turner, R.A., vol.II, London 1913, no.373. There is one impression in Tate’s collection (T04671).
For sketches of the Villa Lante see the St Peter’s sketchbook (Turner Bequest CLXXXVIII) and the Rome: Colour Studies sketchbook (Turner Bequest CLXXXIX); for the Palazzino at Caprarola, see the Viterbo and Ronciglione sketchbook (Turner Bequest CCXXXVI); for the Villa d’Este, see the Tivoli to Rome sketchbook (Turner Bequest CLXXIX); and for the Boboli Gardens, see the Rome and Florence sketchbook (Turner Bequest CXCI).
Verso:
Inscribed by unknown hands in pencil ‘8’ upper centre right and ‘11’ and ‘11’ upper centre and ‘CCLXXX.162’ bottom centre and ‘D.27678’ bottom left. Also in red ink ‘1049‘ bottom left
Stamped in black ‘CCLXXX 162’ lower centre left
Stamped in black ‘CCLXXX 162’ lower centre left
Meredith Gamer
August 2006
How to cite
Meredith Gamer, ‘A Garden, for Rogers’s ‘Poems’ c.1830–2 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, August 2006, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www