A STEAMBOAT pictured in a Turner masterpiece has sunk without trace during restoration, to the dismay of Turner scholars.

They point out that the title of the 1840 painting even refers to “steamboats” in the plural. Turner called it Rockets and Blue Lights (Close at Hand) to Warn Steamboats of Shoal Water when he exhibited it at the Royal Academy in London.

The work, now in the Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, was restored by David Bull, a leading British specialist who is a senior consultant in painting conservation at the National Gallery in Washington. The institute says that the picture has been returned to the way Turner would recognise it and that the steamboat was removed because it was a later addition.

Tests had shown that 70 per cent of the picture’s surface was covered with overpainting carried out by restorers long after Turner’s death. Staff had decided that the later work should be removed if they were to exhibit the painting as a Turner.

Andrew Loukes, Curator of Fine Art at Manchester Art Gallery, where the Turner will be shown next month as part of an exhibition of late seascapes, said: “I believe that David Bull has recovered a lost Turner. It looks so much more like Turner than it used to previously. It’s stunning now.”

Turner scholars are not convinced. They point to 19th-century copies of the work, made a few years after the original, which they say show that there were originally two steamboats. An 1852 print by Robert Carrick and an 1896 photograph in a Christie’s catalogue both showed two boats.

Selby Whittingham, a Turner scholar and a former curator of Manchester Art Gallery, said: “The ‘after’ version looks a much feebler picture than before. It’s lost all its drama. Before, it had been overpainted and, although it may be prettier now, with prettier blues, it seems to have lost its coherence. I was genuinely shocked.”

Edmund Rucinski, the American painter, has been so alarmed by the restoration that he has been researching the painting since August, when he attended a public discussion with the Clark Institute’s senior curator, Richard Rand. Rucinski, a former Fulbright Scholar who was art director of New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs, is asking how an education-led art institution managed, with a leading restorer’s assistance, to lose a steamboat in one of its own Turner paintings and then celebrate the loss as a recovery.

He acknowledges that overpainting was present and that the picture had suffered losses at the hands of earlier restorers. “In this instance, however, Mr Bull appears to have strayed beyond the removal of overpaint and to have removed with it the remains of a crucial iconographic and compositional element of Turner’s own work,” he said.

Rucinski, who will publish his findings in next month’s Artwatch magazine, accuses Mr Bull and his curatorial advisers of taking the action on the basis of “an incomplete and erroneous reading of the picture’s history”.

He said: “Because this error has been presented publicly as a ‘resplendent’ recovery and not as a grave error, the picture and Turner scholarship stand victims of an artistic and art-historical falsification.”

He pointed to the chromolithograph copy of Rockets and Blue Lights credited to Robert Carrick. “As is well known in the literature, the Carrick print, done in 1852, and a large watercolour copy of it made before 1855 by Whistler no less, both show two boats.”

Michael Daley, director of Artwatch UK, which campaigns against the over-restoration of works of art, said: “The Whistler looked like a Turner and the Carrick copy. To say the Turner looks more like a Turner now is barking. It looks more like an abstract that could have been done by anybody in the last 50 years.”

Mr Daley added: “Restorers are turning the Old Masters into a pantomime, undoing and then redoing their work. I begin to suspect now that it’s as if they want to generate excitement, that ‘Old Masters aren’t interesting enough’. A restoration generates excitement. The Tate was trailing this as the star of the (Manchester) show after recent conservation.”

On being told of the latest controversy, Libby Sheldon, a leading conservator who is now paint materials historian at University College London, applauded Artwatch’s work in raising concerns. “It’s good that they (institutions) are being challenged,” she said. “It makes them take more care. Organisations like Artwatch, irritating though they are to institutions, are a good watchdog.”

Asked why the second steamboat could not have been by Turner, Mr Bull said: “The answer to that is we don’t know. It was a general consensus. What I took away was totally repainted. About 70 to 80 per cent was completely repainted. The worst repaint was on the right-hand side, where there were false clouds and plumes of smoke. When this was removed, we discovered the painting had been heavily damaged in the right-hand side. Turner’s upper layer of paint had been lost . . . There was clear evidence that the paint I removed was not by Turner.”

The Tate said yesterday that it had publicised the painting to help to promote other Turner exhibitions. “As it’s not in our collection, we don’t want to comment further.”

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