One of our very valued members, Gillian Peebles, has provided us with some great information on Turner & his use of yellow.

To quote Gillian “I find it so interesting because I remember his watercolours and oil palettes at the Royal Academy and found reference in my notes, I mention W/N’sTurner’s yellow and gamboge because Turner used these colours mixed with the warmer flake white to secure an opaque look in his watercolours. often wished I had purchased some Turner’s yellow while in London as our natural light in Australia is Yellow/orange “

Turner’s Yellow is an opaque rich yellow colour. It is a mixed pigment colour closely resembling the toxic genuine Gamboge and King’s Yellow colours Turner frequently used.

  • High performance pigments ensure strength of colour combined with extremely high permanence ratings
  • Wide and balanced spectrum of colours in Half Pans, Whole Pans and in 5ml, 14ml and 37ml tubes
  • Every pigment is unique and so each is treated according to its individual nature and behaviour
  • Single pigments have been used across the range to ensure excellent mixability

The following is from Winsor and Newton …..”During the industrial revolution, as steamships took over from sailing ships and machines replaced manpower, many areas of innovation and technology were taking place including discoveries in new art materials. Depending on one’s perspective this was the end, or the dawn, of a new era, with natural light about to be replaced by Edison’s electric light at the end of the 19th century, and it is in J.M.W. Turner’s paintings that we see the embers of this era merging with the new industrial age.

Until Turner and Constable, ‘history painting’ was regarded by the Academy as the superior genre in painting, with landscape painting taking a lesser value. Part of Turner’s legacy is in the way he utilised landscape and seascape, elevating them to a higher genre, and using painting as a platform to document the changes taking place in society at that time. Take for example The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last Berth to be broken up (1838) in which an older decommissioned ship is towed by a new steamship. Through this genre he was able to narrate aspects of technological, political and social reforms taking place in society, capturing, in particular, the magnificence of natural sunlight. So obsessed was Turner with his palette of bright whites and burning yellows that one critic even suggested he had “yellow fever”.

Paintings such as his famous The Fighting Temeraire, read ambiguously as a sunset or sunrise, reflecting the pivotal changes taking place. Frequently using Gamboge and King’s Yellow to capture sunlight in its many forms: as an ethereal quality, in its abundance, in its lack, as a vapour, and, as a physical quality soon to be replaced by the artificial rays of Edison. In Gombrich’s (Art’s historian) words, Turner “had visions of a fantastic world bathed in light and resplendent with beauty, but it was a world not of calm, but of movement, not of simple harmonies but of dazzling pageantries…

J.M.W. Turner Turner was born in London’s Covent Garden in 1775. The son of a barber and wig-maker, his father was so proud of his son’s artistic talents that he would display his work at his barber shop. Unlike other painters at the time climbing a professional ladder, Turner remained a ‘cockney’ and kept his accent. There is a scene in the movie Mr Turner (2014) where we see Turner on the day of vernissage (when artists would add finishing touches to their works or varnish paintings before an exhibition opening), frantically working on an unfinished painting. Turner, played by Timothy Spall, spits repeatedly at the canvas and proceeds to blow pigment into its facia, as if in the middle of a dirty fight he will not concede defeat to, attacking his work like a 19th century ‘action painter’ and forcing a loaded hog hair brush into the painting’s surface in a manner which would have no doubt shocked his counterparts and fellow Academicians.

Turner, however, was a child prodigy, a Mozart of painting. Receiving his first commission at the age of 11, he began exhibiting watercolours at the Royal Academy in his teens. Having joined the RA Schools when he was only 14, he was elected an Associate Member of the Royal Academy by the time he was 24, and at 27, a point when most artists today might be contemplating post-graduate studies, Turner had already become a full Academician.

Turner’s genius was matched only by his appetite for the latest innovation in artist materials of the day. It is easier to imagine him in Mr Turner as an enfant terrible fantastically channelling muses, forgetting that painting is a technology. Contrary to his reputation on screen, for insights into the science of new developments and the latest technology, Turner would have been a frequent visitor to a new establishment in 1832, set up by chemist William Winsor and artist Henry Charles Newton, known otherwise as Winsor & Newton.

Turner, whose practice was highly experimental from the outset, would have kept an ear to the ground for new revolutionary materials. A friend and frequent visitor, he would often pop into Winsor & Newton’s new establishment and was one of the very first to try our new watercolour ‘pan paints’, making full use of them by painting outdoors in every kind of weather and ever the cavalier, carrying an umbrella and a sword for whatever trouble may be along the path.

Today our Professional Watercolour ‘Turner’s Yellow’ is made with pigments to closely resemble the Gamboge and King’s Yellow frequently used by Turner to capture the sun’s light. This innovative modern colour is a nod to Turner’s legacy and the ongoing dialogue between sciences and the arts that was begun by our founders William Winsor and Henry Newton at 38 Rathbone Place, around the corner from Covent Garden where Turner himself was born”