Watercolour was seen in Turner’s youth as a very inferior medium, only suitable for developing ideas for a painting, recording travels, or planning during military campaigns. That many teenaged girls were taught drawing as a leisure pursuit didn’t help its status either. Turner himself had a few such pupils in his early years, as he established a reputation – and an income. As well as being Britain’s foremost landscape painter, he was the first to use newly-invented coloured pigments in watercolours. He raised the status of watercolour to a creative medium that rivalled oil. Contemporary artists are still inspired by his watercolours.
Personal accounts of Turner agree that he was an obsessively hard worker, always drawing, sketching and painting and that he did not like to be watched whilst working. By the age of 14 he was a very competent watercolourist, able to depict a country house accurately in perspective, surrounded by Gainsborough-inspired trees, all with excellent control of the watercolour medium (Radley Hall). He was already doing something unique here; he was creatively painting a summer sky behind the house, without resorting to conventionally puffy clouds.
Over the next few years, Turner would master all the traditional watercolour techniques. These include making use of the colour of the paper for the lights. Traditionally artists used off-white writing paper or buff-coloured wrapping paper, because purpose-made paper for artists was only made later. Turner would experiment with light grey or blue paper on which he innovatively used opaque colours rather than the traditional light, transparent washes (A Family Seen from Behind). Here the blue paper itself creates the blue stockings, the bundle of sticks and many other details, which means that this little vignette, surely drawn or memorised from life, could have been created in minutes. Artists at this date didn’t make white highlights by applying a dab of white paint; instead they removed paint to reveal the paper beneath. One method was to pinch out dough from each day’s bread, and let it dry out, creating a range of soft and hard erasers over a few days. Lights could also be created by using a brush load of clean water, wetted natural sponge, or a sharp tool like a needle or pocketknife.
Turner also used his fingers (obvious from numerous fingerprints on many watercolours), or the thumbnail he kept sharp for this purpose, or a rag. Bridge and Cows shows scratching out, rubbing out, and leaving blank paper. All these techniques became effortless to Turner; he could deploy them without conscious thought. He would often soak the paper, and apply a thin wash of warm yellow, followed by a wash of cool light blue. As the paper dried, he added more colours.
The first washes dried with soft edges as in The Rigi, while later brushstrokes on dry paper became hard-edged. He used tiny brushes to place details. These took longer: he had to pause and decide exactly where they would be most telling. A tiny soaring bird of prey over mountains, for example, immediately indicates how imposing the mountains are, and how distant. He didn’t draw such details, and from midlife he often did not need to draw, but painted directly.
When we look at one of Turner’s late watercolours, it is so complex and colourful that it’s impossible to identify each step he took towards the final composition. He could have got there in several ways, in most cases. The unfinished watercolours like The Rigi help us to see how he began the same Swiss scene in The Blue Rigi.
The Turner watercolours in the Wallace Collection don’t illustrate all of Turner’s repertoire of watercolour techniques. The Yorkshire countryside isn’t as dramatic as Switzerland, and Turner knew that his client wanted recognisable scenes of his own countryside. The colours are quite realistic. There is hardly any drawing. The paper was wet when he applied the pale sky and more distant hills. The pale foreground rocks consist of unpainted paper. Turner painted the figures with fine brushes, then scratched out details with a sharp tool. He applied a local skim of gum arabic to make the dark shadowed water look more glossy and liquid. He didn’t need any of the newly-invented artists’ colours he would often use in later life, given the overcast weather depicted.
Many of the coloured pigments used in traditional watercolours are sensitive to light. Colour loss is far from unusual. Turner’s very creative use of colour, as in The Rigi and The Blue Rigi, makes it difficult to identify areas of lost colour, unless previous framing has protected some colour at the outer edges. It’s nonetheless likely that Turner’s Yorkshire scenes, and three others for the same client, have lost blue from their skies, and from mixtures of blue and yellow used to make green. The golden autumnal effect we see in all four may not be what Turner intended. Brightly coloured, telling details look less so when red or blue is lost from them. But we can still marvel at his mastery of the watercolour medium, and his ability to describe a scene in paint that could be but poorly described with hundreds of words.
This article was written by Dr Joyce Townsend, Senior Conservation Scientist at Tate.