English Watercolors

English artists have made a unique contribution to the art of watercolor painting. In no other Western country has this very attractive medium been used so consistently, or for works of such stature, as in England between 1750 and the present day. In this general survey of the whole period, Graham Reynolds, formerly Keeper of Paintings and of Prints and Drawings at the Victoria & Albert Museum, discusses the paintings of over 100 artists including the well-known watercolorists such as Cozens, Girtin, Cotman and De Wint, as well as artists who are equally known for their work in other media - Gainsborough, Turner, Constable, Sargent, Henry Moore. The 140 illustrations, 64 in color, show the work of these and lesser-known artists and reveal the versatility of this medium, so the reader will be introduced to its use for illustrative caricature and portraiture as well as to the finest examples of traditional landscape watercolors.

Paul Mellon (1907--1999) assembled one of the world’s greatest collections of British drawings and watercolors. In his memoirs he wrote of their “beauty and freshness… their immediacy and sureness of technique, their comprehensiveness of subject matter, their vital qualities, their Englishness.” This catalogue celebrating the centenary of Mellon's birth features eighty-eight outstanding watercolors from the fifty thousand works of art on paper with which he endowed the Yale Center for British Art. The selection spans the emergence of watercolor painting in the mid-18th century to its apogee in the mid-19th. These works highlight the diversity of British watercolors, showcasing both landscape and figurative works by some of the principal artists working in the medium, including Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Rowlandson, William Blake, and J. M.W. Turner.

This is an illustrated survey of watercolour painting from 1750 to the present day, including the finest examples of work by Sandby, Cozens, Girtin, Turner, Rowlandson, Cotman, De Wint, Constable, Blake, Palmer, Prout, Rossetti, Whistler and many other famous and not so famous artists, with full notes on each. The author relates the English School to earlier continental artists and sums up the special characteristics and achievements of each artist. He has written twenty books including Victorian Painting, Constable, The Natural Painter and Turner and has won the Mitchell Prize for the History of Art for his catalogue raisonne on The Later Paintings and Drawings of Constable.

Traces the development of Homer as a watercolorist, shows a selection of his landscapes, seascapes, and portraits, and discusses his distinctive style and techniques.

English landscape watercolor painting, a perfect marriage of genre and medium, entered a lively period of experimentation in style and content during the second half of the nineteenth century, with rich and diverse results. Through all the changes of style and technique and all the debates over the appropriate use of the medium, it was watercolor's ability to convey the timeless truth and reality of the natural world that mattered to artists, critics, and audiences. British watercolors of the Victorian period continued to observe an essential humility before nature; they remain fresh and compellingly immediate because they derived in the first place from the artists' heartfelt communion with the elements of nature. Victorian Landscape Watercolors begins with a consideration of the continuing influence of the great generation who earlier in the century, during the extraordinary parallel rise of watercolor and landscape painting, had established the landscape watercolor as a major British contribution to the arts. The second chapter examines the role of the landscape watercolor in the aesthetic thought of John Ruskin, whose critical voice played a dominant role in shaping that art. The third chapter looks at the place of landscape within the watercolor societies and its development as it appeared in their annual exhibitions. The final chapter deals with the tug of new and old, foreign and native in the later Victorian period. The book also features 126 watercolors, from public and private collections in America and England, all reproduced in full color and accompanied by individual commentaries. Among the 76 artists represented are David Cox, Sr. and Jr., Walter Crane, William HolmanHunt, Edward Lear, Samuel Palmer, James Mallord William Turner, James McNeill Whistler, and Ruskin himself, along with dozens of lesser-known masters of the medium. Victorian Landscape Watercolors is published in conjunction with the first exhibition to survey this period of this particularly British contribution to the arts; the exhibition, organized by the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, will also be seen at the Cleveland Museum of Art and in Birmingham, England.

The revolution in watercolours of the later eighteenth century and its Victorian aftermath is acknowledged to be one of the greatest triumphs of British art. Its effect was to transform the modest tinted drawing of the topographer into a powerful and highly flexible means of expression for some of the Romantic era's greatest artists, among them Thomas Girtin, J.M.W. Turner and John Constable. The painters of the next generation were no less ambitious, and the range of subject-matter and technical inventiveness that was sustained for much of the Victorian period was to set a standard in watercolour painting that was without equal abroad. In this magnificently illustrated survey of the great age of British watercolours, Andrew Wilton and Anne Lyles trace the development of attitudes to landscape and to the human figure in the landscape from 1750 to 1880. They show how once the traditional pen and ink drawing and its augmented washes of colour had been abandoned in order to paint directly in watercolours without pen outlines, the way was open for the powerful Romantic landscapes of the following decade and beyond, many of which were painted in the wild mountainous regions of Wales and Scotland. During the nineteenth century, as the gilt-framed exhibition watercolour began to challenge the long-established oil painting in terms of size and in brilliance of colour and effect, the range of subject-matter was broadened to include scenes of country and town life from every part of Britain and, increasingly, from the Continent too. By mid-century the Near East was attracting many of the greatest Victorian watercolourists, including J. E. Lewis, David Roberts and Edward Lear. Other leadingVictorians who regularly worked in watercolour include the Pre-Raphaelite painters John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, and the American-born James McNeill Whistler, all of whom are included in this book.