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

This composition has been painted very thickly in gouache, on blue wove paper. The paper makes a modest optical contribution to the pale sky and to the lightest part of the river, in the foreground. In the tiny spaces left between brush-strokes in the foreground, it contributes detail, acting like blue gouache. Elsewhere, the gouache conceals much of the paper colour, but in places it has been scratched out with a pin or other small, sharp tool, for example to create the lighter leaves of the large tree in the centre.

X-radiography of the paper confirmed that much of the gouache contains lead white, which is highly absorbent to X-rays. Lead white is also very opaque in appearance. It was used for the striking white details of the costumes, the distant building, and for the windows of the tower seen against the sky, as well as for the heavier clouds on the left side. Turner was an early user of lead white in gouache, and by the middle of the nineteenth century other artists were also using it regularly. Lead white in scanty amounts of medium as Turner used it, can easily discolour to a speckled or solid dark brown when it reacts with hydrogen sulphide gas, a common urban pollutant during the nineteenth century. Here, the gouache is in excellent condition.

X-radiography also indicated that the light yellow pigment used extensively for details in the foreground is chrome yellow, another lead-based material which is easy to characterise without the need to remove even a tiny sample. The chrome yellows had by this time become Turner’s first choice for all shades of yellow from pale through to deep orange tones. This pigment is very opaque in appearance, and almost conceals the blue paper where it was used in the immediate foreground, though it may be mixed with lead white to give it even more solidity. In oil paintings, Turner habitually applied the palest shade over a layer of lead white to make the most use of its clear tone, but he has not applied the same technique anywhere in this watercolour.

A tiny sample was removed from an edge, from the sky paint on the right, and compared with samples of gum medium using an organic analysis technique called Fourier transform infrared microscopy. This confirmed that Turner used gum water, not glue water, to make his gouache. The tendency of his gouache to crack when thickly applied had made it impossible to assume this without analysis. Knowledge of his painting medium makes it possible to choose the best modern adhesive, if any flaking gouache has to be secured in the paper conservation studio. This analysis also showed that the lighter-looking gouache in the sky paint is made from chalk, a more typical watercolour material than lead white, and one which is less opaque-looking when used in gum medium. The same tiny sample could then be retrieved, and placed in the sample chamber of a scanning electron microscope, under an X-ray beam. This beam interacts with the elements that make up each pigment, and the resulting spectrum makes it possible to work out which elements are present. This confirmed the X-radiography: the yellow pigment used in the right side of the sky is also chrome yellow.

Thus, this detailed composition is created from a very narrow range of colours, including a pinkish red lake pigment, a warm brown earth pigment but hardly any other brown, black, blue or pure green materials, skilfully deployed to give a myriad of surface tones.

Engraved:
By J.T. Willmore in 1834, published in 1835.

In this watercolour, Turner presents a scene of people relaxing in the open air of the park under the Lanterne de Démosthène tower, in the town of Saint-Cloud, located in the western suburbs of Paris, France. The monument was built by Napoleon but no longer exits as it was destroyed during the Siege of Paris in 1870. At right, the River Seine meanders away into the distance, spanned by the multi-arched bridge at Saint-Cloud. The crowds of figures, in their light-coloured, bright clothes, including the soldier in smart uniform in the central foreground, convey an atmosphere of festivity.

The watercolour was based on pencil sketches (Tate D23902,1 D23908,2 D23910 and D23926;3 Turner Bequest CCLIV 11a, 14a, 15a, 23a) in Turner’s Seine and Paris sketchbook from 1832, as well as possibly a sketch (Tate D24550; Turner Bequest CCLVIII 26a4) in his Dieppe, Rouen and Paris sketchbook from 1821.

An engraving was made of this watercolour by J.T. Willmore in 1834, as The Lanterne at S^t. Cloud (Tate impressions T04717, T05619 and T06255) for the volume Wanderings by the Seine of 1835.5 Streaks of cloud have been added to the sky in the engraving. Leitch Ritchie’s accompanying text provides a joyous and amusing description of the scene.6

There are related inscriptions on the verso (D40127).