This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
When Charles Lock Eastlake, a Royal Academician and Turner's friend of nearly forty years, published the first English translation of Goethe's Zur Farbenlehre in 1840, complete with his own extensive notes for British artists, J.M.W. Turner acquired a copy and went through it with a pencil. What survives is not a record of simple agreement. Art historian John Gage, who studied the annotations directly and remains the principal authority on them, describes Turner responding with disdain and suspicious caution as often as approval, terse or amusing marginal notes rather than a student's careful underlining. Where Goethe described shadows cast by raised hands, Turner scrawled that if this were fact there would appear two men out of one. Where Goethe laid out his scheme of primary colors, Turner wrote simply, what, blue and yellow. Gage's own 2009 lecture on the annotations goes further, arguing that Turner, for all his engagement, was not fully attuned to the specific distinction Goethe drew between the higher and lower transformations of blue and yellow, and had, in fact, developed his own light and dark polarity independently before he ever read Eastlake's translation. When John Ruskin later asked Turner directly what his 1843 tribute painting Light and Colour meant, Turner's answer was characteristically evasive: red, blue, and yellow.