Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice

F(gure 1. J. M. W. Turner, Goring Mill and Church, ca. 1806-1807. Oil sketch on canvas,
857 X 1162 111111. Courtesy of the Tate Gallery, London (N02704).
Some works were abandoned at this stage, for example Goring Mill and Church
(ca. 1806-1807), in which the buildings were lightly drawn in pencil before
washes were applied of thinned linseed oil paint in green and brown for grass,
buildings, and cattle, and in highly thinned, pale blue paint to suggest the
clouds (Fig. 1). Other abandoned oil paintings from this date and later have
little or no pencil underdrawing. Turner used it mainly to outline buildings
or ships, where accuracy mattered. By contrast, landscapes and trees were
usually freely painted. In later years, Turner used increasingly brightly colored,
thinned paint as a first lay-in, generally brown for the landscape and blue for
the sky, leaving white priming in areas that would later be depicted as yellow
sunlight. He glazed down the colors as he worked. Cross sections from most
oils show thin transparent washes, overlaid by thin paint layers in the same
colors, lightened with lead white. Some abandoned works have a patch of
bright red or blue in the foreground, which Turner would have developed
into something appropriate as the image evolved, perhaps a red buoy in the
sea, or a brightly dressed figure in a landscape.
Turner's earliest oils look thickly and conventionally painted at first glance or
when viewed through accumulated yellow varnish, but this is deceptive. Dolbadern
Castle, North Wales is a good example (Fig. 2). Turner presented it to
the Royal Academy, London, when he obtained full membership at the age
of twenty-eight. Recent cleaning revealed thin glazes of Mars orange (i.e.,
strongly colored synthetic iron oxide) and localized scumbles of black, and
Mars orange or red, with white in the landscape. The surface was, in fact,
vulnerable and potentially sensitive to solvents. Clouds were applied with a
thicker, creamy-looking paint that retained brush marks, small areas were then
scumbled over with quite bright yellows or pinks, applied rather lean. Naples
yellow, reddish brown ochres, a purplish ochre, and ivory black provided these
highlights, while the sky itself was painted in ultramarine, lightened with lead
white. Turner continued to use ultramarine for finishing skies throughout his
life, having often done the initial lay-in with smalt, though not in this case.
He used Prussian blue glazes and washes over thicker layers of brown ochres
and umbers for the greener parts of the landscape and the stream. The fastflowing
water is indicated by small flecks of textured white paint. These may
be lean strokes of paint applied in a pure oil medium. In other paintings, such
areas were found to contain linseed oil but very rarely walnut oil, despite the
fact that the latter was known to yellow less. It is much less likely that the
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