Tutor: Joyce Townsend
J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) was the foremost landscape artist of his age. In early life, before he used oil, he worked in watercolour using a whole repertoire of techniques to create lights in his compositions. This experience greatly influenced his methods when, later, he took up painting in oil. All his life, he exploited newly invented pigments and innovative ways of marketing his works as well as producing them, and his output was prodigious. Understanding and appreciating Turner’s materials and processes is relevant to understanding all of his contemporaries who worked in watercolour and oil.
In his later years, Turner’s habit of completing oil paintings in the days immediately before the annual exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts became legendary.
Much of his work can be seen today in the Turner Bequest at Tate Britain, London.
There will be a 55 minute presentation followed by 15 minutes of discussion.
Joyce Townsend is Senior Conservation Scientist, Tate, where she investigates the materials and techniques used by British artists from the later sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, especially the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the ways such paintings have changed as they age. She is author of How Turner Painted: Materials and Techniques (2019 Thames and Hudson) and many other publications.
For more information, please visit our website: https://academicprojects.co.uk/courses/turners-painting-materials-and-techniques/