The Fugitive

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up, 1838

In our last Perspectives we wrote a bit about J.M.W. Turner’s (1775-1851) unusually colorful skies and the probability that he was painting real atmospheric effects caused by volcanic eruptions a continent away. What we did not write about was why so many of his paintings are much less vivid today than they were when he painted them. We know this from written descriptions of the paintings when they were new. Turner was notoriously indifferent to the permanence of his colors, especially the reds. He was well aware of the fugitive nature of some of his paints, but he inexplicably did not care. In a famous exchange between Turner and Mr. Winsor, of Winsor and Newton, on the topic of color permanence of the pigments he was buying, Turner is said to have told Mr. Winsor to mind his own business. Although there were some permanent reds available to the artist, the brilliant, vivid reds that Turner loved to use in his sunse…