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

The dense inscription on this page is a poem by Turner, written with the sketchbook turned vertically. It continues onto folio 9 recto opposite (D21867). Since Finberg’s initial transcription of part of the poem in his 1909 Inventory of the Turner Bequest, the text has been cited by numerous Turner scholars, among them John Gage and Cecilia Powell, both of whom concluded that Turner likely produced the poem on the eve of his departure from Rome.1 He left the city early on Saturday 3 January 1829, according to an inscription inside the front cover of the Rome, Turin and Milan sketchbook of the same tour; see Tate D41050 (Turner Bequest CCXXXV).

While parts of the poem are illegible, much of it was transcribed by Finberg, and later amended by Gage:

There are five more lines, albeit increasingly difficult to make out. The verse continues on D21867
opposite, picking up after four more obscure lines:

Powell noted that Turner’s foray into poetry was evidently an attempt to match the last poem in Samuel Rogers’s Italy; ‘A Farewell’.2 This was one of the poems for which Turner had recently provided a vignette: see Meredith Gamer’s entry in the present catalogue (Tate D27667; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 150). Turner may also have drawn inspiration from the ‘Farewell to Italy’ in William Sotheby’s Italy and Other Poems of 1828.3 While parts of Turner’s poem are illegible or obscure in meaning, several of its phrases indicate that ‘despite all the new experiences of 1828, his basic attitude towards Italy, her history and her countryside, had changed remarkably little’, Powell concluded.4