Great British Watercolors

By KAREN WILKIN

WSJ.com
August 2, 2008;

New Haven and New York

An English friend maintains that the British are not a visual people. “We like words,” he says, “and gardens. That’s why all those British conceptual artists who do things with trees and rocks are so popular. But what we’re really good at is language. Look at our novelists and poets.” He may have a point, but visitors to “Great British Watercolors From the Paul Mellon Collection,” at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Conn., through Aug. 17, may have reason to doubt his pronouncement.

Seen last year at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, and the Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia, the exhibition was organized to honor Paul Mellon, the founder of the Yale Center, on the centennial of his birth (he died in 1999). Yet what the show really celebrates is not a connoisseur’s passion, nor even British mastery of a particular kind of painting, but the importance of English artists in transforming a medium once thought of as purely utilitarian into something appropriate to the demands of ambitious art — all in purely visual terms.

“Great British Watercolors” can be enjoyed simply as a miscellany of prime examples of the discipline. More than 80 works from the mid-18th to the mid-19th centuries provide a great deal to delight the eye. Some of the best-known British artists are represented: Richard Parkes Bonington, John Constable, Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Girtin, Samuel Palmer and Joseph Mallord William Turner, for example, along with the satirist Thomas Rowlandson. But the Mellon collection is notably broad — only a fraction is represented in the exhibition — so the selection also pays homage to less familiar figures, known for their contribution to the evolution of the medium, artists such as Alexander Cozens, Cozens’s son John Robert, Paul Sandby and John Cotman. And there is a host of obscure but often gifted painters, including the irresistibly named Julius Caesar Ibbetson, Michael “Angelo” Rooker, and Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding; the last, christened in honor of the Flemish-born 17th-century master and the Boston-born 18th-century portrait painter, was clearly destined for his chosen profession.

The closest we get to the words and language my friend claims dominate the British consciousness are the works by William Blake and Edward Lear, both equally accomplished as artists and writers. The exhibition’s Blakes include several sheets from an illustrated version of Thomas Gray’s poems, prepared as a birthday gift for the wife of the neoclassical sculptor John Flaxman; Blake surrounded pages from a printed edition of the poems, pasted on larger sheets of paper, with sinuous images tenuously related to such themes as “The Progress of Poesy.” Lear is represented by two fluent records of his travels in Egypt and the Holy Land, one with color notes written in for future reference.

Yale Center for British Art

William Blake illustrated Thomas Gray’s poems — such as ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,’ above — as a gift for the wife of the sculptor John Flaxman.

The subtext of “Great British Watercolors” is a history of the medium itself, in terms of both its reputation among artists and its technical possibilities, during the crucial century spanned by the selections on view. While water-based paint has a long history in Britain — the lavish manuscripts produced by English and Irish medieval monasteries were illuminated with watercolor — the earliest works in the exhibition demonstrate that in the 18th century, the medium was subservient to drawing. Renderings of picturesque landscapes, towns and monuments, both at home and abroad, executed with meticulous line, are enlivened with tinted washes.

Against these sharply focused images, Alexander Cozens’s washy, direct “fantastic landscapes” signal the beginning of a new way of painting on paper. A theorist, painter and teacher, famous for advocating working from the imagination, rather than from observation, Cozens suggested inventing images through free association. He advised starting pictures by laying in broad, monochrome washes and than turning the “blot,” as he called it, into an ideal landscape. (There’s an echo of Leonardo da Vinci’s recommendation that artists study the stains on walls for inspiration.) Cozens’s work was crucial to the acceptance of watercolor painting as serious art.

The exhibition’s lively Gainsboroughs, their loose strokes and washes heightened with chalk, further advance the cause of watercolor as a responsive painting medium, rather than as an adjunct to line. These improvisational landscape fragments, punctuated with sketchy carts and country folk, are both demonstrations of virtuosity and embodiments of the cult of sensibility — feeling — that dominated Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and was mercilessly pilloried by Jane Austen.

Watercolor’s enhanced status was officially announced in 1804 with the first exhibition of the newly formed “Society of Painters in Water-Colours.” The exhibition makes clear the ambition of the society’s members. British watercolor painters used their portable, quick drying medium to address everything from domestic interiors and English beauty spots to still life and scenes of exotic travel. The best exploited the transparency of the medium to evoke the pale sun of an English spring, the cloudy skies of Northern Europe, the brilliance of the Mediterranean — and more, including the agonies of the Crimean War.

Constable and Turner are the stars of “Great British Watercolors,” their paintings tributes to the evocative power of pools of tone and subdued color. The Constables are sketchy studies, the Turners usually more finished, but both depend on rapid gestures, bold overlays, and, often, wiping or scraping. The luminosity and audacity of the Turners make their rather conventional subject matter irrelevant. A study of Crichton Castle, amid mountains, with a rainbow, is so apparently spontaneous that it’s like watching the artist at work.

In a sense, Turner’s whole career illustrates the thesis underlying “Great British Watercolors”: An accomplished recorder of notable places in Britain transformed himself into an internationally acclaimed painter of romantic, often fantastic, landscapes and seascapes. Until Sept. 21, that evolution can be traced in the retrospective “J.M.W. Turner” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There’s a splendid selection of Turner’s paintings, including a stellar group of his uninhibited watercolors, both public and private, many of them even more brilliant and remarkable than those in New Haven, good as they are. See both exhibitions and then try to decide if the British are better at words than images.