Victorian Landscape Watercolors

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.

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.

The Victorian era gave rise to some of the most beautiful and extraordinary watercolours ever painted. With their meticulous technique and discreet purpose, they convey much about the romantic and moral temperament of the age. This volume is the first general introduction to what was a particularly popular medium in the Victorian era and was, in fact, the preferred form of expression for many artists. Through his discussion of subject matter and stylistic development, Christopher Newall provides a fascinating insight into the artistic sensibility of the period. Featuring full-colour masterworks by such major figures as Ruskin, Burne-Jones and Rossetti, along with many lesser-known but respected talents and analyses of both the individual works and the way in which they contributed to the stylistic development of the medium during the period, this is a valuable addition to the scholarship on Victorian art.

The author discusses the development and characteristics of Victorian painting, setting them within the context of time. He covers the multifarious facets of painting styles, from social realists to fairy painters, whilst not neglecting traditional areas such as marine, landscape, sporting and animal. The various artistic movements- aesthetic, classical, romantic - are all considered. The book combines a study of the two mediums of oil and watercolour in a single volume.

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.

A Sketchbook by A Victorian Artist of Drawings and Watercolors - In Forty Eight Plates. This rediscovered sketchbook from the 1890s shows an artist of skill and sensitivity observing the world with sketches and watercolors of people, birds, animals and the landscape. It is an interesting view into the time and a useful guide for students of drawing and painting.

This is the first publication to examine the seascapes of John Brett (1831 - 1902), the Pre-Raphaelite artist who devoted his later years to touring and painting the British coastline. He had a particular fondness for Wales, where he owned property and was one of the earliest artists to respond to the more remote areas of North Pembrokeshire.