Turner's vanishing boat

Apollo, July, 2005 by Edmund Rucinski

In his acceptance of the changes made to Turner's Rockets and Blue Lights during its recent restoration, Eric Shanes ('A Turner Resurrected', APOLLO, May 2005) seems to have accepted that those responsible were conversant with all the primary sources of documentation of the picture's appearance throughout its history. My researches (which Mr Shanes kindly cites) suggest that this may not have been the case.

As I have shown, the defence that was publicly offered (at a lecture given at the Clark Institute on 2 August 2003 by the restorer David Bull and the Clark's senior curator, Richard Rand) for removing one of Turner's two steamboats was that the boat was not original, that it was a restorer's addition. In support of this claim, a one-boated image of the picture was shown that was said to be Robert Carrick's near-contemporaneous chromolithographic copy of the painting and to have been supplied to the Clark by the Yale Center for British Art. That claim was mystifying: the Carrick copy famously records both of Turner's steamboats. My (repeated and recorded) requests to the Clark Institute and the Yale Center for some identification of the one-boated image have gone unanswered. Mr Bull himself could throw no light on the matter, telling me in a (transcribed) phone conversation that he did not know the identity of the image in question, and had only worked from a photograph of it supplied by Mr Rand from an original image held at Yale.

Although Mr Shanes concedes that without access to the conservation progress reports that the Clark Institute admits to possessing (but declines to make available) it is impossible to verify the restorer's claim that he removed no original material by Turner, he nonetheless accepts the claim itself as seeming 'entirely believable'. There is no reason why the treatment or mistreatment of major works of art held in trust for the public should be regarded as matters of belief. Records are here said to exist. What good reason, then, could there be for continuing to withhold them in defence of a so very controversial and so unsatisfactorily supported major restoration 'treatment'?

Edmund Rucinski, Mechanicville, NY