Audio Stop 702

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We hover over a flax-yellow body of water lined with ships to our left and right, which are silhouetted against a moonlit, cloud-veiled sky in this horizontal landscape painting. The horizon comes about a third of the way up the composition. The moon hangs to our left of center in the sky, its light reflecting on the clouds in a bright, hourglass shape to create a tunnel-like effect. The sea below turns from a gold color close to us to pale blue along the horizon. To our left, one ship with gray sails is cut off by the edge of the canvas and another, also with gray sails, is situated farther from us. A small, dark rowboat with two passengers moves between them. Light from the windows in buildings along the distant horizon to our left reflect in the water, and another building, a factory, spouts white flame from its chimney. More dark ships line the waterway to our right, their spiky masts black against the sky. Three flames, one orange between two pale yellow fires, flare in the darkness in front of the ship closest to us. The forms of men shoveling coal, crates, and barges are dark silhouettes against the firelight and smoke. More rowboats float among the boats in the distance. Near the lower right corner of the canvas, a broad, flat fragment of wood floats close to us. The hot orange and black on the right side of the painting contrasts with the silvery gray, light blue, and white that fills much of the rest of the composition. The painting was created with thick, blended brushstrokes throughout, giving the scene a hazy look. The texture of some of the brushstrokes is especially noticeable, as where the moon casts white light onto the water and in the clouds. The artist signed a buoy floating to our left with his initials, “JMWT.”

Joseph Mallord William Turner

Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight, 1835

West Building, Main Floor - Gallery 57

A flood of moonlight breaks through the clouds and illuminates the sky and water. The heavy impasto (thick buildup of paint) of the moon’s reflection on the expanse of water rivals the radiance of the sky, where gradations of light create a powerful, swirling vortex. To the right, the keelmen and the dark, flat-bottomed keels that carried coal down the river are silhouetted against the orange and white flames from the torches, as the coal is transferred to the larger ships. Behind the ships to the left, the artist suggested a distant cluster of factories and ships with touches of gray paint and a few thin lines.

Read full audio transcript

FRANKLIN KELLY:
“Among its many treasures, the National Gallery is very fortunate to have the largest and most important group[s] of works by Joseph Mallord William Turner outside of his native England. And amongst those very special treasures is the work we’re now looking at: Keelmen Heaving In Coals By Moonlight, painted in 1835.”

NARRATOR:
The scene is the River Tyne in the north of England near Newcastle, the great coal center. To the right are the flat-bottomed barges of the keelmen, who are transferring coal to large sailing ships for transport.

FRANKLIN KELLY:
“Turner shows us in this scene a rather mundane event, but it’s happening at moonlight and indeed, we see a great tunnel of light, which stretches off into the distance here, with the moon at its axis. And that’s played off against the hot orange and yellow light of the fires which the keelmen are using to light their way.”

“The painting has recently been cleaned here at the National Gallery’s conservation lab and it’s changed rather dramatically. Before, the many discolored layers of varnish had turned yellow and that yellow color over the whites and silvery blues of Turner’s original pigment had combined to create a kind of greenish aura, which really didn’t look like moonlight, daylight, or any other kind of light. Now that the conservation treatment has been completed, we can see this particularly ethereal ghostly blue-silver light that Turner obviously went to great lengths to attain.”

NARRATOR:
The same British textile manufacturer who commissioned this work commissioned a companion piece. It’s a sun-bathed canvas called Venice: The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore—and it’s usually on view in this gallery.

FRANKLIN KELLY:
“Because of his general working methods, there’s a tremendous danger when one works on restoring one of his paintings, that one might inadvertently change something that he put there. So, very carefully when this painting was taken to the conservation lab and treatment was undertaken, the first thing that the conservators working with curators such as myself and colleagues, try to understand is exactly how the painting has reached the state that it has today. And indeed, in a painting such as the Keelmen, even looking at the lower edges of the reflection of light on the water, you can see that in places Turner used very thick built-up pigment, but in other areas, like the distant boats and masts and sails at the right in the far background, it’s thin washes of almost translucent, almost watercolor-like paint. So there’s a tremendous amount of subtlety and variation that Turner used to get these effects. And one can’t follow any kind of set formula when you approach them.”

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