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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > East Anglia, Sussex and Yorkshire 1824 > Brighton and Arundel Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Recipes for Pigments c.1824

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Recipes for Pigments’ c.1824
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 3 Recto:
Recipes for Pigments c.1824
D18315
Turner Bequest CCX 3
Pencil on white wove paper, 118 x 75 mm
Watermarked ‘Smith & [Allnutt] | 18 [22]’
Inscribed in pencil by Turner with recipes for pigments (transcribed in full in the main entry)
Inscribed in blue ink by Ruskin ‘3’ top right and ‘251’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCX 3’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
These are Turner’s recipes for a yellow pigment (possibly zinc chromate) and a copper-based green pigment. The artist’s notes begin, however, with a recipe for preserving milk for several days using horseradish.
Tate conservation scientist Joyce Townsend writes that Turner’s inscription ‘Coppers’ may in fact refer to ‘copperas’, now known as the compound zinc sulphate. Further notes on the chemical aspects of lithographic reproduction, engraving and painting are found on Tate D18313–D18314, D18316; Turner Bequest CCX 2–2a, 3a.
Turner’s notes are transcribed thus:
‘Horse Raddish put into milk will
preserve it many days –’
‘Hydrodate of Zinc
with Nitrate of Lead
Bright Lemon colour’d Precpt
Heated Magnasia correct
R[...] oil –
A Green
Coppers dissolved in boiling
vinegar with one part of a
[...] of arsenic in which
the precipitates gradually [...]
dissolved in Vinegar and then boild
the P is the Green with –
the Potash of [...] or warm a deep
Green, and by heat mixed’.

Alice Rylance-Watson
February 2015

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘Recipes for Pigments c.1824 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, February 2015, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, August 2016, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-recipes-for-pigments-r1181200, accessed 19 May 2024.