Turner's Mysterious Yellow

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Abergavenny Bridge, Monmountshire Watercolor J.M.W. Turner

A favorite pigment color in our watercolor palettes has always been Holbein’s Indian Yellow. This led us to doing a little research on the history of Indian Yellow, one of the traditional colors used by J.M.W. Turner. What we thought would be a straightforward fact-finding mission left us scratching our heads. The story of Indian Yellow’s origins and manufacture is shrouded in mystery and contradictory accounts.

A popular story relies on hearsay and a single letter written by Mr. T. N. Mukharji sent to the Society of Arts in London in 1883. In it, he described the process of making Indian Yellow as consisting of collecting the urine of cattle left to roam in mango orchards in the Bihar province of India. In one version of this story it was said that the cows were made to urinate into buckets on command. The urine was then concentrated over fire, filtered through cloth and made into balls left to dry in the sun. An…