Turner Natural Rose Madder Watercolor Review: Beautiful but Fugitive
Turner Natural Rose Madder Watercolor Review: Beautiful but Fugitive
Turner Natural Rose Madder is a genuine single-pigment NR9 watercolor made from Natural Madder Lake. It is a beautifully transparent, low-staining red that lifts easily and, in my tests, produces some absolutely wonderful blossoms.
But there is an important catch.
Genuine Rose Madder is not particularly lightfast. Turner gives this paint only a one-star lightfastness rating. That doesn’t mean I don’t use it—it means I need to understand what the pigment does well and where its limitations are.
And Rose Madder does several things extremely well.
What Is Natural Rose Madder?
Rose Madder is a traditional plant-derived lake pigment with a history stretching back centuries. Unlike many of the modern synthetic pigments sitting on my palette, genuine Rose Madder comes from the madder plant.
When I originally started using Rose Madder, I used the Winsor & Newton version. Unfortunately, at some point I couldn’t find the larger tube size. A manager at my local art store told me it was back-ordered indefinitely.
I am not particularly good at waiting indefinitely.
I also wasn’t thrilled about the price.
That eventually led me to the considerably more affordable Turner Natural Rose Madder, and I’ve continued using it.
[Purchase this paint ONLINE]
What Color Is Rose Madder?
Rose Madder is a blue-leaning red.
That color bias is important because it determines what happens when you start mixing it with other colors.
Mix Rose Madder with a blue and you can create some gorgeous violets and purples. Because the red already leans toward blue, the two colors work together instead of immediately neutralizing one another.
Mix it with yellow?
Things can get ugly.
Because Rose Madder has that blue bias, mixing it with yellow effectively introduces all three primary colors into the mixture. Instead of getting the brilliant orange you might expect from a warmer red, the mixture can become dull and neutralized surprisingly quickly.
Sometimes that’s useful.
Sometimes you’ve just made watercolor swamp juice.
Does Turner Rose Madder Granulate?
Slightly.
In my tests, Turner Natural Rose Madder shows some visible granulation, particularly in the middle and darker values where there is enough pigment on the paper to see what it’s doing.
As the wash becomes more diluted, the granulation becomes increasingly difficult to see. In very light washes, I barely notice it at all.
I wouldn’t buy this paint specifically because I wanted dramatic granulation. I have plenty of other colors that will happily do that job.
Rose Madder has a much better trick.
Turner Rose Madder Creates Beautiful Watercolor Blossoms
This is where this paint really shines.
Rose Madder blossoms beautifully.
Drop additional water into a wet, concentrated passage of Rose Madder and give it a little time. The incoming water pushes the pigment outward and creates those wonderful feathery edges and organic shapes that watercolor painters call blossoms, blooms or backruns.
Some painters spend their entire watercolor lives trying to prevent these.
I encourage them.
Painting fireworks in the sky? Rose Madder is fantastic. Drop some water into a dark wet passage and wait. Instead of carefully painting every explosion and little streak of color, let the water move the pigment for you.
The darker and wetter the original passage, the more dramatic the effect can become.
This is one of the reasons I continue keeping Rose Madder around despite its lightfastness problem. There are certain watercolor effects where I care more about how the pigment moves than what the color looks like straight from the tube.
Is Rose Madder a Staining Watercolor?
This is another major advantage.
Turner Natural Rose Madder is very low staining in my experience.
Non-staining watercolor pigments can be a painter’s lifeline.
Make a mistake?
Completely screw something up?
Welcome to watercolor.
With Rose Madder, I can usually go back into the dried passage with clean water and a damp brush and remove an impressive amount of the pigment. On good watercolor paper, I can sometimes lift almost all of it.
Interestingly, I don’t necessarily want every last particle gone. A small amount of residual color left in the paper can produce a beautiful soft glow instead of returning the area all the way to white paper.
That lifting ability also makes Rose Madder useful for glazing over previously painted passages. I can introduce a transparent warm or reddish layer without immediately staining the paper into submission.
For the way I paint, that’s extremely useful.
Is Rose Madder Lightfast?
Here’s the problem.
Not particularly.
Turner gives Natural Rose Madder only a one-star lightfastness rating. Genuine Rose Madder has historically been known as a fugitive pigment, meaning prolonged exposure to light can cause the color to fade or change over time.
That’s important information if you’re creating original watercolor paintings intended for display and sale.
It’s also why Rose Madder isn’t the only red on my palette and why I don’t generally build an entire painting around huge areas of this pigment.
There are modern red pigments with substantially better permanence.
So why do I still use it?
Because sometimes the handling characteristics of a watercolor pigment are just as important to me as the color itself.
Rose Madder gives me transparency, easy lifting, beautiful blossoms and a particular warm color influence in mixtures that I enjoy using.
I just use it with an understanding of its limitations.
What Is Turner Rose Madder Best For?
For me, Rose Madder works best as a supporting color rather than the star of the painting.
I use it for warming mixtures, creating violets with blues, glazing, producing blossoms and adding subtle red warmth to passages that need a little more life.
I don’t use huge amounts of it by itself very often, particularly because of the lightfastness issue.
Think of Rose Madder as the pepper in a recipe.
You probably don’t want a plate containing nothing but pepper.
But add the right amount and suddenly everything else tastes better.
Unless you’re Gordon Ramsay.
That guy doesn’t seem to like anything.
Do You Need Rose Madder on Your Watercolor Palette?
No.
And that’s actually important.
Unlike Cobalt Blue, Ultramarine Blue or Burnt Sienna, I don’t consider Rose Madder an essential watercolor pigment. There are more permanent modern reds available, and if I were building a tiny beginner palette, Rose Madder probably wouldn’t make the first cut.
But I still use it.
Its beautiful blossoms, transparency, low staining and easy lifting give it handling characteristics I genuinely enjoy. I especially like using it to warm other colors rather than relying on it as the dominant red in a painting.
So Rose Madder occupies an interesting position on my palette.
I don’t need it.
But I would miss it if it disappeared.
And considering my original Winsor & Newton version basically did disappear from the store shelves, apparently I’ve already tested that theory.
Compare More Watercolor Essential Paints
No single watercolor pigment does everything. Some colors earn their place because they mix beautifully, some granulate, some lift easily, and others create effects that are difficult to reproduce with anything else. Explore more of the watercolor paints I use and compare how they behave:
- Winsor & Newton Cobalt Blue — A foundational, low-staining blue that lifts easily and works beautifully for skies, water, shadows, and mixing.
- Winsor & Newton Ultramarine Blue — A strongly granulating blue that creates dramatic blossoms and mixes exceptionally rich darks with Burnt Sienna.
- Winsor & Newton Burnt Sienna — A granulating earth color and one of the workhorses on my palette, especially useful for colorful darks and neutral mixtures.
- Winsor & Newton Cerulean Blue — A green-leaning, granulating blue I use for atmospheric effects, charging wet washes, fog, and cool accents over darker passages.
- Holbein Sap Green — My favorite natural-looking tube green, with beautiful granulation, blossoms, and excellent potential for colorful landscape darks.
Each pigment behaves differently on paper. My Watercolor Essentials reviews focus on the characteristics that actually matter when I’m painting: color bias, transparency, staining, lifting, granulation, blossoms, mixing behavior, and whether the color really deserves space on my palette.
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Ryan Fox AWS, NWS, TWSA
Ryan Fox Painting
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