Joyce Townsend

Dr Joyce Townsend FIIC ACR is Senior Conservation Scientist at Tate. She has concentrated for over 30 years on the identification and deterioration of artists’ materials and on the interpretation of artists’ techniques in both oil and watercolour, for works from the 16th to the 20th centuries. These studies have included Turner, Whistler and Sargent among 19th-century British artists, and Picasso, Picabia and Francis Bacon for early and mid-20^th-century international art, the periods she has investigated in greatest depth. She has recently published several studies on the making of Tate artworks in Tate Papers, and is working on a chapter on Joanna Mary Boyce Wells and the artists in her family circle, for a book edited by Katey Herrington, as well as a technical study of Rossetti’s oils and works on paper in the Tate collection. She is the author of How Turner Painted: Materials and Techniques (Thames and Hudson 2019) and other books on the materials of British artists, and an editor and contributor to many Archetype publications. She is currently Honorary Professor in the School of Culture and Creative Arts, Glasgow University, where she is contributing technical studies to the online catalogue of Whistler’s oil paintings and to the 2022-23 exhibition on the artist The Woman in White.