Colour story: Turner's Yellow

Turner's Yellow is an ode to the pigments used so avidly by JMW Turner. The mixed pigment colour embodies the great artist’s rebellious and spirit and unconventional painting methods, along with his friendship and collaboration with Winsor & Newton. Read on to discover just how revolutionary Turner’s distinctive use of yellow and his political landscape paintings truly were.

JMW Turner’s paintings showcase the dawning of a new age of painting. This was the era of the Industrial Revolution, when steamships replaced sailing ships, and manpower was traded for machines. This period of swift innovation and technology also greatly affected new art materials.

Until artists like Turner, ‘history painting’ was regarded as the superior genre, and landscape painting held an inferior value. It was Turner who challenged this outdated notion, and in turn elevated landscapes and seascapes to a higher genre. He used painting as a platform to document the societal changes taking place at the time, through the slightly more unusual tapestry of landscape. But how?

Take Turner’s piece The Fighting Temeraire (1838), which shows an older decommissioned ship being towed by a new steamship. In this piece he uses striking symbolism to capture the effects of technological, political and social reforms of the time.

Turner also captured the magnificence of natural sunlight with the pigments he used. He frequently used 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’s lightbulb. Turner was so enthralled with a palette of bright whites and burning yellows that one critic even suggested he had ‘yellow fever’. In art historian Ernst Gombrich’s words, the artist ‘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.’

For insights into the science of new developments and the latest technology, Turner was a frequent visitor in 1832 to a new London establishment set up by chemist William Winsor and artist Henry 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 headquarters. As one of the very first to try our new watercolour ‘pan paints’, Turner made full use of them by painting outdoors in every kind of weather.

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. Interestingly, the pigment’s name actually comes from James Turner, the chemist who patented Lead Chloride Oxide in 1781. Even so, this innovative modern colour is a nod to JMW Turner’s legacy and the ongoing dialogue between sciences and the arts that was begun by William Winsor and Henry Newton at 38 Rathbone Place, around the corner from Covent Garden where Turner himself was born.