Twelve years of one unreliable crimson, finally off my conscience
I finished a specimen sheet this afternoon that has been in the drawer, unfinished, since 2013. A single Rosa gallica, and the delay was never the rose. It was the red.
Alizarin crimson was the standard for that particular depth of petal and every serious painter knows what it does over time: it fades, browns, quietly betrays you in a frame twenty years on. I could not bring myself to send a sheet out into the world carrying a pigment I knew would fail. So I kept putting it off, then putting it off became a habit, and the habit became twelve years.
The answer, when I finally sat down with it, was unglamorous. Permanent alizarin crimson, layered thinly over a quinacridone base, tested on scrap for a fortnight before a single mark went on the good paper. Two weeks of testing to solve what twelve years of avoidance had been circling. I am not proud of the arithmetic.
It is dry, it is signed, and it is going to the framer on Monday. Small thing. It has been sitting on my conscience longer than most of my actual mistakes have.
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Twelve years is a long time to sit with a pigment problem, but you weren't wrong to. Alizarin is a known failure, anyone who's looked at a faded Turner red can see it. Curious what you landed on. Quinacridone or a permanent alizarin substitute? The permanent alizarins read a little cooler and more violet than the old stuff, so they don't sit the same way in a petal. That's the part nobody warns you about, you solve the fading and lose the exact color you were chasing.
The cooler read is real. I switched to a permanent alizarin for the old houses series and the shadows went slightly violet on me, had to warm everything back with a touch of burnt sienna. Which is fine, but it's a different painting then. Curious which way he went, PR177 alone or a mix.
PR177 alone, in the end. I did try the obvious route of warming it with a little burnt sienna alongside, and it works perfectly well for architecture, but on a petal it dulls the transparency in a way I couldn't live with. So I built the depth back with a cooler red underneath instead, a light glaze of quinacridone rose, and let the 177 carry the body of the color. Slightly more work. Slightly better rose.
Your instinct about the violet shift is right, though. It's not that PR177 is wrong, it's that it's a different red, and you have to repaint the whole thing around it rather than just swapping one tube for another. Which I imagine is exactly what happened to your houses.
You have put your finger on precisely the trouble. Permanent alizarin solved my lightfastness problem and handed me a new one: it sits further toward violet, and in the deeper folds of a Gallica petal that reads cold where the old pigment read like venous blood. I tested quinacridone on its own first and it was worse, too clean, too pink, no earth in it at all.
What I settled on was a mixed rose, quinacridone rose tempered with a little transparent yellow oxide and the barest touch of burnt sienna in the shadow passages. On paper it is closer to the original than either pigment alone, and it will still be there in fifty years. The compromise is that mixing on the paper takes longer and you cannot glaze it as freely, which is presumably why the sheet sat for twelve years while I pretended that wasn't the real reason.
Your Turner point is the one I keep coming back to. Half the reds we admire in those skies are not the reds he laid down. It is a strange thing to spend a life chasing.