Turner's vanishing boat

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

As I have shown the maintenance that was publicly offered (at a discourse given at the Clark Institute upon 2 August 2003 by the restorer David male and the Clark's senior curator, Richard Rand) for removing individual 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 transcript of the painting and to have been supplied to the Clark through the Yale Center for British Art. That claim was mystifying: the Carrick transcript famously records both of Turner's steamboats. My (repeated and recorded) entreatys to the Clark Institute and the Yale Center for a certain quantity of identification of the one-boated image have gone unanswered. Mr male himself could throw no light upon the matter, telling me in a (transcribed) phone conversation that he did not know the identity of the image in question, and had solitary worked from a photograph of it supplied through Mr Rand from an original image held at Yale.

Although Mr Shanes give ups that without access to the conservation progres reports that the Clark Institute admits to possessing (but declines to make available) it is impossible to verify the restorer's claim that he remov no original material by means of Turner, he nonetheless accepts the claim itself as seeming 'entirely believable'. There is no reason on what account 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 advantageous reason, then, could there be for continuing to withhold them in protection of a so very controversial and in the way that unsatisfactorily supported major restoration 'treatment'?

Edmund Rucinski, Mechanicville, NY

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