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

The Gipsy was engraved by Edward Goodall and published as an illustration to Part I of a long poem ‘The Pleasures of Memory’ in the 1834 edition of Rogers’s Poems.1 The vignette appears beneath the following lines:

Besides the inclusion of a cauldron and a fire on the right-hand side and the pink evening light with the sun setting in the background, Turner’s illustration bears little relation to Rogers’s rather theatrical description of his encounter with a gypsy fortune teller. In contrast to the mysterious scene evoked in the poem, Turner’s vignette shows a modest gypsy camp with a couple of figures cooking a meal over the fire and laundry hanging on a washing line nearby. The quotidian nature of these activities, in addition to the sunlit windmill and the two small children in the middle distance, gives the scene a pastoral tone. However, Turner’s gypsies could still be read as objects of anxiety. Writing in the Athenaeum, one anonymous author described the engraved scene with typical prejudiced hostility: ‘in a sheltered spot, the vagrants have turned their asses out to graze; raised a rude, triangle over a fire, and suspended a pot, in which a venerable sibyl is preparing a stew, to which the neighbouring preserves and henroosts have doubtless contributed’.2

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