Turner, 'The Fighting Temeraire'

Ashok Roy, the head of the National Gallery's Scientific Department, explains why Turner's bizarre concoctions make his paintings difficult to clean.

Transcript

Narrator
The great Romantic artist, J.M. Turner, painted this picture of 'The Fighting Temeraire' in 1839. Ashok Roy, head of the National Gallery's Scientific Department, explains why Turner is often referred to as a 'painting restorer's nightmare':

Ashok Roy
He particularly used unconventional paint media, so instead of taking ordinary oil paint, he would add things like wax, resin, non-drying fats and so forth and this makes the pictures very difficult to treat and to conserve, largely because the paint medium often remained soluble and it means that it's very difficult to clean these kind of pictures safely.

Luckily, 'The Fighting Temeraire' is not one of those paintings and in fact, it's quite conventionally painted, using walnut oil as the binding medium. And it's probably as a result of that fairly conventional technique that the picture, for a Turner, is in superb condition.

And in fact, interestingly, he uses two particularly intense red pigments, opaque pigments in the sunset. The red pigment, vermilion, which was a traditional painters' material, and also a newly invented pigment called iodine scarlet or pure scarlet, which had only been discovered in 1812 by the British chemist, Sir Humphrey Davey. Unfortunately, it's the one part of the picture where we know there's been serious colour change, because this particular pigment loses its colour, fades, very quickly in the life of the picture.

Turner uses a great variety of tools. He uses brushes of all kinds of different sizes and shapes and he was also very keen on using the palette knife to create those impasto effects that you see in, for example, the sunsets as in this picture; you see these very sharp edged applications of blocks of paint, thick paint to create those textural effects as well as the colour effects you see in the picture.

I think this is a picture which has two absolutely stunning parts. There is the ship, the 'Temeraire' itself, and the tug, which is painted in quite a different way from the surrounding seascape, and the dramatic sunset, which is really like an explosion at the horizon.

And I think part of the power of the picture is the conjunction of the ghostly hull of the ship and that explosive drama of the brilliant sunset next to it.

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