^™ liii

4
w
•v

HPf** ! «
i

-
B

•
:
?» r #.jmm- {
BOSTON
PUBLIC
LIBRARY
VICTORIAN WATERCOLOURS
 VICTORIAN
WATE RCOLOURS
Christopher Newall
Phaidon •
Oxford

B
a&*m*

W-& **SU

'p,
'i^-

IF
Phaidon Press Limited
Littlegate House
St Ebbe's Street
Oxford
OX1 1SQ

© 1987 by Phaidon Press Limited

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Newall, Christopher
Victorian watercolours.
1. Watercolour painting, English
2. Watercolour painting, Victorian — England
I. Title
759.2 ND1928
ISBN 0-7148-2424-0

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval

system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission
of Phaidon Press Limited

Printed in Spain by Heraclio Fournier SA, Vitoria

Half-title. Sir Frederick William Burton, RHA, HRWS (1816-1900). Dreams, c. 1861. Watercolour and bodycolour, heightened with
gum arabic, 20.3 x X 12 in.) Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund.
30.5 cm. (8V8

Frontispiece. George Samuel Elgood, RI (1851-1943). Roses and Pinks, Levens Hall, Westmorland, 1892. Watercolour, 31.8 X 49.5 cm.
(12V2 x 19V2 in.) Private collection
CONTENTS

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION 11

1 STYLE AND TECHNIQUE 13

2 PROFESSIONAL LIFE 23

3 THE ROMANTIC INHERITANCE 31

4 THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 45

5 THE PRE-RAPHAELITE SUCCESSION 59

6 THE IDYLLISTS AND OTHER ILLUSTRATORS 83

7 THE AESTHETIC MOVEMENT 103

8 LATE VICTORIAN WATERCOLOUR PAINTING 119

CONCLUSION 138

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 140

PHOTOGRAPHIC CREDITS 141

INDEX 142
1. George Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle, HRVVS (1843-19111. The Fi^h-Pomi at Vallombrosa. Watercolour and bodvcolour,
16.8 X 23.5 cm. (6 5/s X 9Vi in.) Collection of Richard Dorment
For Jenny
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

spirit of its painters. In

gave rise to some of the

the field of
T JLhe

most beautiful and extraordinary works ever to be painted

.he Victorian period was rich and prolific in the creative
watercolour painting there was an unprecedented surge of activity and the age
in that medium. A vast range of
techniques and subject-matter was explored and certain distinct stylistic changes occurred. These factors brought
about a minor revolution in the art of watercolour painting before the middle of the nineteenth century and
determined the character of that art for some fifty years. As the century drew towards its close the preoccupation
with style and technique lessened, and to a great extent watercolourists reverted to more long-standing traditions.
Thus the subject to which I have addressed myself has at least a vague beginning and ending.
In a short book I propose to concentrate on the watercolourists whom I find most interesting and who
represent the age as I understand it. I have referred to and provided illustrations of watercolours by various little-

known painters because I believe that the history of the period depends for its richness on the careers of many
minor figures of idiosyncratic and distinct talent. Conversely, I have ignored some important and esteemed artists,

either because their work is relatively familiar and therefore does not require a token representation, or because
their careers do not correspond to my admittedly subjective view. This book was never intended to be an
encyclopedia of watercolour artists; no disapproval is implied by the omission of a particular painter's name.
Many people have contributed to this book. Friends whose intuitions and knowledge have helped me form
my own ideas have been Judy Egerton, Julian Hartnoll and Andrew Wilton; they will not necessarily agree with
my conclusions but I remain grateful for all that they have shared with me. I am further indebted to Francis
Hawcroft, James Holloway, Huon Mallalieu, Hilary Morgan, Sue Ryan, Robert Snell and Rosemary Treble.
Penelope Marcus, who suggested that such a book should be written in the first place, has given me great
encouragement; I am grateful to her for asking me to write this book, and for all her help. Diana Davies has given
invaluable editorial advice.
I have met with a friendly and generous response on the part of the many museum curators in whose
company I have looked at watercolours in public collections. I am proud to be allowed to illustrate many beautiful
watercolours from museums in this country and in the United States, the majority of which have not been
reproduced in colour before. I acknowledge with gratitude the kind help that I have received from the staff of these

museums, the names of which appear in the captions attached to the plates.

A further delight has been the privilege of seeing collections of watercolours belonging to private
individuals, some of whom were old friends, others people I am fortunate to have met in the course of writing this
book. I have been honoured by permission to illustrate watercolours belonging to many private collectors,

including those who have preferred to remain anonymous in the captions attached to the plates.
I have had much kind help from auctioneers and picture dealers. Alice Munro-Faure of Sotheby's provided
me with the transparencies for the Half-title and Plates 22, 23, 47, 54 and 69; Miranda North Lewis of Christie's
Bill Drummond provided me with the
those for Plates 21, 63 and 78; Robin Barlow of Bearnes that for Plate 11.
transparency for Plate 86; Richard Hagen that for the Jacket; Peter Nahum those for Plates 19 and 74; Bill
Thomson of the Albany Gallery that for Plate 51; and Christopher Wood those for Plates 32, 92 and 95.
have very much enjoyed writing this book, and have learnt a great deal in the process. am sincerely
I I I

grateful to all those who have encouraged me with their enthusiasm and interest.
2. Walter Crane, RWS (1845-1915). At Home: A Portrait, L872. Watercolour and tempera, 71.1 x 40.7 cm.
(28 X 16 in.) Leeds City Art Gallery
3. Alexander Macdonald (1847-1921). A Study of Opal in Ferrugineous jasper from New Guinea, 1884. Watercolour,
15.2 X 15.6 cm. (6 x 6Vs in.) Sheffield, The Ruskin Gallery - Collection of the Guild of St George
INTRODUCTION

peculiarly British form of art, and one that received

careers of J.R. Cozens, Girtin and Turner, approximately
wits
¥ ¥ atercolour
ate

finest expression
painting has

from the beginning of the

century to the middle of the nineteenth. This great tradition was by no means extinguished during the second half
of the nineteenth century. Succeeding generations of Victorian artists
last
come to be seen as a

during the period which coincided with the

quarter of the eighteenth

found that watercolour lent itself to the

effects of brilliant colour and rich tone which were amongst the qualities demanded by, and which characterize
from an historical standpoint, the taste and art of that age.

Victorian watercolour painting represents both a divergence from the approach and technique of the
earlier English watercolourists, and a rapid evolution of their principles. Victorian watercolourists rebelled against
the conventions and constraints of a less adventurous age but also saw themselves as heirs to a century-old

tradition. Some of them were participants in the major artistic developments of the day; others were isolated from
the mainstream.
all aspects of contemporary life and the surroundings amongst which that
Watercolour was used to record
life was The appearance of the landscape, architecture, and the people themselves, was rapidly changing, and
led.

this process was documented by a multitude of watercolourists. Their paintings reveal a view of the world which

derives on the one hand from a romantic consciousness and an occasionally hallucinatory imagination, and on the
other from the humility of dispassionate observation. With their fastidious technique and discreet purpose, they
convey much about the moral and neurotic temperament of the age.
The nineteenth century was marked by a fundamental materialism. The Victorians were fascinated by the
essential character of physical objects in nature, and indulged a passion for the description and classification of
materials. They created and utilized a style of painting which served to record accurately the objects under
scrutiny, as in Alexander Macdonald's Study of Opal (Plate 3). Most Victorian artists aimed to represent the

physical world realistically, and those who collected paintings were delighted to recognize the type and character of
objects depicted, and to comprehend the elements of a composition. Whether purely documentary and
investigative, or depending upon imaginary, even fantastic, visions of the world, Victorian watercolour painting
portrays an apparently familiar scene, and aims to spark a reflex of recognition in the mind of the individual. Thus
the obsession with realism and accuracy in detail and colour produced the intense and compelling character of
much of what was painted.
For a generation of artists realism was a matter of professional necessity; the Art journal observed in

1857: 'richness, depth, substance, and finish, are in these days indispensable, if reputation is to be achieved or

sustained.' Only in the latter part of the century did a new aesthetic creed emerge which made the artist's

expression, rather than the spectator's ability to recognize the nature of the subject, paramount.
4. Edward Henry Corbould, RI, RWS (1815-1905). Saul and the Witch of Endor, 1860. Watercolour and bodycolour, 66 x 78.7 cm. (23 x 61 in.

Property of Sutton Place Foundation

1STYLE AND TECHNIQUE

Chinese White as a
A revolution occurred in the realm of watercolour
painting when, in the 1830s and 1840s, artists adopted the use of bodycolour as a technique.
manufactured pigment upset the convention, which had been established
The introduction
in the eighteenth
of

century, that watercolours should be built up in thin washes of translucent colour on sheets of white paper, the
colour of which was used to illuminate the lighter areas of the composition. The first generation of Victorian
watercolourists discovered that, by mixing white paint with pigments to create opaque colours of even texture akin
to gouache, they could achieve a richer and more consistent tonal range, and that colour which had a thicker

consistency was better adapted to the intricate drawing of detail and the description of the texture of surfaces.
More traditional or conservative painters admitted the use of Chinese White to provide brilliant areas or points of

reflected or direct light in their compositions.

From the start the use of bodycolour was a matter of controversy and acrimonious discussion. While many
continued to regard it with disfavour, for William Henry Hunt and John Frederick Lewis, and subsequently for the
Pre-Raphaelites and the generation inspired by the art-philosophy of John Ruskin, a return to what was called the
pure watercolour technique was unthinkable. The Art journal repeatedly referred to the different factions in the
debate for and against the use of bodycolour; in 1863 for example the following account appeared:

The conflicting claims of transparent and opaque colour have yet their several adherents. The pure
practitioners, however, of that which pretends to be the legitimate method, are each year becoming fewer in

number. The increasing desire for detail, the value of force and firmness in the lights, the advantage of
contrast between parts which should stand out in solidity and passages that are better just in proportion as
they retire into liquid shadow, all put a premium upon an opaque medium when used with skill, moderation,
and discretion.

Three years later, however, the Art journal was 'glad to observe a reaction from the immoderate use of opaque
colour which some time since threatened to corrupt the purity of the practice of former years.'
Ruskin, in The Elements of Drawing (1857), refuted the contemporary charge against bodycolour
painting:

This mixing of white with the pigments, so as to render them opaque, constitutes body-colour drawing as
opposed to transparent-colour drawing, and you will, perhaps, have it often said to you that this body-colour
is 'illegitimate. ' It is just as legitimate as oil-painting, being, so far as handling is concerned, the same process,
only without its uncleanliness, its unwholesomeness, or its inconvenience . . .

Ruskin besought his students to: 'Use Chinese white, well ground, to mix with your colours in order to pale them,
14 STYLE AND TECHNIQUE

instead of a quantity of water. You will thus be able to shape your masses more quietly, and play the colours about
with more ease;' having established the 'legitimacy' of the method he eulogized its virtues:

I say, first, the white precious. I do not mean merely glittering or brilliant: it is easy to scratch white sea-gulls
out of black clouds, and dot clumsy foliage with chalky dew; but when white is well managed, it ought to be
strangely delicious, - tender as well as bright, - like inlaid mother of pearl, or white roses washed in milk. The
eye ought to seek it for rest, brilliant though it may be; and to feel it as a space of strange, heavenly paleness
in the midst of the flushing of the colours.

The cult of bodycolour persisted until late in the century. In 1896 Kate Greenaway considered its status in a letter
to Ruskin; she wrote: 'I'm so longing to try more body-colour. It's a curious thing everbody runs it down - yet -
all the great water-colour people (the modern ones) have used it - W. Hunt, Walker, Pinwell, Rossetti, Burne-
Jones, Herkomer. The history of Victorian watercolour painting
' is bound up with the use of bodycolour: realism

of representation, as well as the strength of colour and tone and the richness of texture, depended on the use of
pigment made opaque by the addition of Chinese White.
During the Victorian period there emerged two distinct types of watercolour: the finished work made by
professional artists for the purpose of exhibition; and the sketch or preparatory study. Finished watercolours, on
which artists worked for months at a time, such as Edward Henry Corbould's Saul and the Witch of Endor (Plate
4), which was shown at the New Water-Colour Society in 1860, were large in scale and allowed watercolourists to
feel confident that they could compete on equal terms with painters in oil. These exhibited watercolours were the
works by which an artist hoped to establish his reputation and on which his professional expectations depended.
As finished watercolours became more elaborate in style and distinct in purpose from the preparatory
sketches and drawings on which they were based, a mood of nostalgia for a simpler style of watercolour painting

set in. In November 1862, the Old Water-Colour Society held its first Winter Exhibition of 'Sketches and Studies
by Members'. J.J. Jenkins, later President of the Society, wrote: 'It was urged that exhibitions of sketches would
prove to the Public highly interesting and instructive, as they would display the artistic motive from the slightest
rudimentary commencement to the more elaborated sketch drawn direct from nature.'
From the beginning the complaint was made that artists tended to introduce finished works to the Winter
Exhibitions, and thus upstaged the true purpose for which they were organized. The Art Journal observed in 1867:

'Artists now spend days and weeks over a study, when formerly they would have knocked off a sketch in a couple of
hours. Jenkins warned
' : Tt is at all times difficult and perhaps dangerous to limit an artist's freedom of expression.
What one may call a sketch another considers finished. Still little by little the impression gains that the Winter
Exhibitions gradually trend towards those of the summer months. '
J. L. Roget concluded in 1891 that 'there has in
later times been little, if any, difference in completeness or "finish" between [members'! summer and winter
exhibits, except that the latter have a white margin and the former are closely framed in gold.' The importance of
exhibiting finished watercolours at any opportunity lessened only when watercolourists no longer depended for

professional renown upon the impact of a few spectacular works in the crowded exhibition forum of the two
watercolour societies.
Considerations of finish could be ignored, at least until the 1870s, only by artists who used watercolour for
personal and experimental purposes. Many painters, including those who regarded oil as a more appropriate
medium for the public display of painterly skill, resorted to watercolour to work out ideas for compositions, or to

study the colour and surfaces of their subjects. Sir Edwin Landseer, for example, used watercolour and bodycolour
over a chalk outline in his Study of a Horse (Plate 5); because the drawing was never intended to be displayed only
certain areas, and details with which the artist was particularly concerned, have been worked up to a realistic level.
5. Sir Edwin Landseer, RA (1802-1873). Study of a Horse. Watercolour with black and white chalks, 27.8 X 36.9 cm. (10% x W/i in.)
Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum
16 STYLE AND TECHNIQUE

Charles West Cope, like Landseer a member of the Royal Academy, resorted to watercolour in Girl holding a Slate
(Plate 6), which is thought to be a portrait of his daughter.
In landscape painting the difference between watercolours painted for the private edification of the artist

and those painted for the gratification of public demonstrated by comparing Ruskin's The Walls of
taste can be

Lucerne (Plate 7) with a view of the same city by Ruskin's friend Alfred William Hunt (Plate 8). The first
represents a form of pictorial notation whereby meditations on the landscape and buildings under scrutiny may be
rapidly recorded; the second is a minutely detailed construction which allows the spectator to explore the
architecture and environs of the town, and which is complete in itself. Both are beautiful and stem from each
artist's affection for the place, but they represent different artistic objectives.
A wide range of new artists' materials and colours was introduced in the nineteenth century; in some
instances these were the by-products of contemporary scientific and industrial discoveries. Chinese White was
available from 1834; Viridian Green, Cadmium Yellow, Ultramarine, Magenta, Cobalt Violet and Yellow, and
Manganese Violet were introduced during Victoria's reign. Ruskin recommended: 'Cobalt, Black, Lemon yellow,
Raw sienna, Mars orange, Brown madder, Smalt, Gamboge, Cadmium yellow, Burnt sienna, Extract of vermilion,
Burnt umber, Antwerp blue, Emerald green, Yellow ochre, Light red, Carmine, Vandyke brown, Prussian blue,
Hooker's green, Roman ochre, Indian red, Violet carmine [and] Sepia' to the readers of The Elements of Drawing;
two of these- Antwerp and Prussian blue -he considered fugitive, but he consoled his pupils with the words: '. . .

you need not care much about permanence in your work as yet, and they are both beautiful.'
In the 1860s, when Ruskin was absorbed by the symbolism of colours and the moods that different colours
inspire, he urged Edward Burne-Jones towards the use of a lighter range:

put the black out of [your] box, and the browns, and the indigo blue - or perhaps it might be shorter to shake
everything out of the box and then put back in it the vermilion and the violet carmine, and the cobalt and
smalt, and chinese white, and perhaps a little emerald green or so, and try what you can do with those, on gold
ground . . .

These were to be the rich and sonorous colours of the second phase of Pre-Raphaelitism.
A new colours introduced by Mr Miller of Long Acre in 1853 was recommended to students by the
series of

Art Journal on grounds of cheapness. In 1861 the journal announced that 'Messrs. Rowney are now selling a . . .

colour-box, containing ten cakes of colour, excellent in tint and pleasant to work, for the sum of one shilling - just
the price which we were accustomed to pay, many years ago, for a single cake. The commercial distribution of new '

and vivid colours, which resulted in their widespread availability and relative cheapness, whether sold in cakes,
tubes or, as in the case of Chinese White, in bottles, was an important factor in allowing the Victorian
watercolourist to indulge his fondness for richness of texture and brilliance of colour.
During the course of the century drawing paper also gradually improved in quality and became less

expensive. However, bodycolour was often needed to disguise flaws in the surface of paper, and on other occasions
artists complained that drawings were ruined because of its poor quality. J.W. North campaigned for the
introduction of paper of more consistent surfaces, and set up his own company to make what he called 'O.W.
Paper'; his example led to a general improvement in the standard of manufactured papers in the later years of the
century.
The products of a mechanically ingenious society thus transformed the artist's working methods. In 1864
the Art journal was rhapsodic on the subject:

Furthermore, when the art of water-colour painting consisted of little more than a wash - the resources of the
6. Charles West Cope, RA (1811-1890). Girl holding a
Slate. Watercolour, 49.5 x 24.2 cm. [19Vi X 9Vi in.)
Private collection
18 STYLE AND TECHNIQUE

artist were necessarily circumscribed within comparatively narrow limits. But as the colours at command
multiplied, as the papers manufactured became of every variety of substance and surface, from the
smoothness of an ivory tablet to the roughness of a brick and plaster wall, and as the modes of manipulation
magnified the power of the skilful master ambitious to push his art to the utmost pitch of elaboration, so did
watercolour painting at length extend its dimensions and enhance its glory, so that the question now arises,

whether the world, in the entire circuit of its history, in its boasted methods of fresco, tempera, encaustic, or

oil, has ever known a medium so consummate in advantage as water.

The variety of new materials available to watercolourists was paralleled by an elaboration in the means used to

apply colour and gain pictorial effects. The innovation of opaque bodycolour led painters to devise a new
technique, known as stippling, whereby minute touches of colour were placed together in dense patterns to create
the forms of a composition. Texture and modulation of surfaces were achieved by variations of the intensity of this
pattern and where bright colours were sought combinations of tints were placed together to give shimmering or
iridescent effects.
Ruskin believed that exact naturalism depended on the texture of colours, and that by means of stippling
the painter could achieve the constant variety of surface found in nature where 'no colour exists . . . without
gradation'. Brightness and vivacity and the sense of looming colour or light depended on the broken surfaces of the
watercolour. He expressed the potential of such handling in the following homily:

Give me some mud some ochre out of a gravel pit, a little whitening, and some coal-dust,
off a city crossing,

and will paint you a luminous picture, if you give me time to gradate my mud, and subdue my dust: but
I

though you had the red of the ruby, the blue of the gentian, snow for the light, and amber for the gold, you
cannot paint a luminous picture, if you keep the masses of those colours unbroken in purity, and unvarying
in depth. {The Elements of Drawing, 1857)

As the bright local colours of Pre-Raphaelitism gave way to effects of tonality and atmosphere artists resorted to

extreme measures to unify and articulate their compositions. Violet Hunt described how her father A.W. Hunt
subjected 'delicately stained pieces of Whatman's Imperial ... to the most murderous "processes," ... He
sponged [them] into submission; he scraped [them] into rawness and a fresh state of receptivity.' Sponges were
used to soften or blur the outlines of precisely drawn forms and to simulate the effects of haze or mist. The end of a

reversed brush was occasionally deployed to enliven areas of wet colour and knives were used to striate the textures
or scratch through to the original whiteness of the paper below. Sometimes watercolourists adopted the techniques
of oil painting. Opaque colours were scumbled over transparent washes, and glazes of varnish and gum arabic were
applied to give both depth and lustrous texture to the surface.
The virtuosity of techniques used by watercolourists advanced with the century. Hubert von Herkomer
gave an account of John William North's method whereby

the first significant touches are laid in with a stiff-haired brush, using warm colour very thickly, as thickly as
it comes out of the water-colour tubes, but only dragged or rubbed on in a semi-dry condition. ... If not dry
enough it causes a patchiness; if too dry the colour does not come out of the brush. Blotting paper is

indispensable for regulating the consistency of the colour at this stage. ('J.W. North, A.R.A., R.W.S.,
Painter and Poet', in the Magazine of Art, 1893)

In The Old Pear Tree (see Plate 90) North painted minute hatchings or scratched tiny strokes over the surface to

modulate the colours and to invest them with rich and varied textures. North's friend Herbert Alexander described
7. John Ruskin, HRWS
(1819-1900). The Walls of Lucerne. Watercolour, 34.1 x 38.1 cm. (13 3/s X 15 in.

Coniston, Cumbria, Brantwood Trust

8. Alfred William Hunt, RVVS (1830-1896). Lucerne. Watercolour and bodycolour, 31 x 48.5 cm.
(12'/4 X 19% in.) Private collection
20 STYLE AND TECHNIQUE

how 'an effect of intricate detail is found on examination to be quite illusive - multitudinous form is conjured by
finding and losing it in endless hide-and-seek till the eye accepts infinity.'
Herkomer gave an account of his own working method when he painted his watercolour portrait of Ruskin
in 1879 (Plate 9):

I used in those days to paint abnormally large water-colours and always covered the paper first with a wash of
some ochre or grey, then sketched the subject with charcoal. would then commence with a hog-hair brush,
I

working up the ground colour with some fresh tones, and out of a kind of chaos produce a head. Ruskin
queried even the possibility of this and would hardly believe that my final outlines and delicate bits of
drawing were put in last. His theory was to draw the outline with the precision of an expert penman and then
fill in with colour. (J. Saxon Mills: Life and Letters of Sir Hubert Herkomer, 1923)

Ruskin's surprise at the way in which Herkomer brought the drawing to a resolution reveals the polarity between
method which derived from the eighteenth century
the different traditions of sketching line and adding colour, a
and which became associated with amateur watercolour painting, and the more modern approach of building up
the masses of a composition and adding drawn detail to make the subject recognizable at the last stage.
Although the Victorians avidly seized upon watercolour as a means of record and artistic expression,

doubts were expressed about the practical qualities of the medium. Virulent correspondences took place in the Art
journal and The Times about the impermanence and vulnerability to light of the new and established pigments. In
1886 J.C. Robinson pointed out that the collection of watercolours at the South Kensington Museum, by being
'continuously exhibited in the full daylight for twenty or thirty years past', were 'irrevocably injured'.
Various means were suggested for the protection of watercolours against fading: certain watercolourists
favoured sealing their works with varnish; others, including Ruskin, believed the fading process to be inevitable.
Fortunately, Victorian houses, unlike the South Kensington Museum, were seldom brightly lit; in fact curtains

and blinds were often left closed even during daylight hours. In other collections drawings were kept in folios or
flat boxes. Thus many Victorian watercolours have survived in pristine condition.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century a new preoccupation with the momentary effects of light

and movement percolated through the spheres of British art. Even before any native counterpart to French
Impressionism of the 1870s and 1880s came about watercolourists were impelled to record the transitory and
enveloping effects of weather on the landscape, the blur of movement, and the fleeting facial expressions which
might offer insight into the psychology of an individual. These new artistic objectives encroached upon and
undermined the occasionally ponderous High Victorian standard of 'finish', and the contemporary view of what
constituted realism.
The age of the exhibition watercolour gave way to one in which the virtue of the medium was again
understood to be its freshness and capacity to capture the impressions of an instant. Fluency and calligraphic
dexterity were the qualities which artists sought to introduce into their drawings, and to achieve these ends
watercolourists reverted to simpler and more direct technical means. Bodycolour painting was dismissed by many
as inappropriate and tending to lead to a confusion between the different properties of oil and watercolour. North,
for example, shifted in his later career towards a pure watercolour technique, finding the use of white, according to
Herkomer, 'a continual deadener of the glowing tones he endeavours to produce'.
By the end of the Victorian period artists no longer sought to raise watercolour painting to the level where
it might compete in terms of finish and scale with oil, but rather resorted to it for the qualities which made it quite
dissimilar: flexibility and adaptability; speed and spontaneity; spirit and expressiveness.
9. Sir Hubert von Herkomer, RA, RVV5 (1849-1914). Portrait of John Ruskin, 1879. Watercolour,
73.7 x 48.3 cm. [29 x 19 in.) London, National Portrait Gallery
 Fig. 1. The Royal Water-Colour Society, Pall Mall, London

Fig. 2. The Royal Institute of Painters

m Water Colours. Piccadilly, London
2 PROFESSIONAL LIFE

painting was practised by artists

D
who took their professional
uring the nineteenth century the art of watercolour
status and careers very seriously.
supported by watercolourists, and served the twin objectives of exhibiting and selling works by
Two societies

members and
were

promoting the medium in competition with the advocates of oil painting. Considerable prestige was associated
with membership of these societies and their histories indicate the importance and popularity of the medium.
The senior association, the so-called Old Water-Colour Society, had been founded in 1804 by a group of
watercolourists frustrated by the indifference or hostility shown to the medium by members of the Royal
the
Academy, a stance which was maintained fairly consistently until the 1870s. Charles Holme wrote of the
Academy's unwelcoming attitude: 'The Academy had never treated the art of water-colour painting as one which

ought to be taken seriously; it had, indeed, rather gone out of its way to fix upon workers in the medium the stamp
of inferiority, and to ticket them as unworthy to be counted among the leaders of the profession.'

The Society fulfilled an important role and attracted a large following. John Ruskin recalled in later life:

I cannot but recollect with feelings of considerable refreshment, in these days of the deep, the lofty, and the
mysterious, what a simple company of connoisseurs we were, who crowded into happy meeting, on the first
Mondays in Mays of long ago, in the bright large room of the Old Water-Colour Society; and discussed, with
holiday gaiety, the unimposing merits of the favourites, from whose pencils we knew precisely what to
expect, and by whom we were never either disappointed or surprised.

But by the 1830s the Society had itself become a conservative and exclusive body. In 1831 it was attacked in a

newspaper article which opened with the words: 'The monopoly of this institution, by the paltry, mercenary
workings of its members, has contributed mainly to its corruption and degradation.' The article anticipated the

founding of a new watercolour gallery, 'set afoot ... on a more enlightened and encouraging principle'. In 1832
the New Society of Painters in Water Colours was established.

From this time on, and throughout the remaining years of the century, a bitter rivalry operated between
The Old Water-Colour Society had its premises in Pall Mall East (Fig. 1), close to the Royal
the two societies.
Academy and National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. The New Society, which changed its name to the Institute of
Painters in Water Colours in 1863, also operated from Pall Mall until 1883 when it moved to a palatial new
building in Piccadilly opposite Burlington House, the home of the Royal Academy since 1868 (Fig. 2).
Antagonism was fuelled by the fact that watercolourists frequently defected from the junior to the senior
society in the hope of better prospects. The Institute became, in the words of Charles Holme, 'to some extent a

stepping stone to the "Old Society," because a number of the water-colour painters whose merits it was the first to
24 PROFESSIONAL LIFE

recognise were unable to resist the temptation to pass on into the other association, which seemed to them to offer

superior advantages of seniority and professional position.'

The question of amalgamating the two societies and combining their interests and responsibilities was
sometimes discussed, usually by outsiders at moments when relations between the two were most strained. In the

late 1850s each petitioned the government for space to build galleries and offices at Burlington Gardens, where
they would have become part of the envisaged complex of society and institutional headquarters which was to be
based on Burlington House. However, neither was accommodated; the Art journal concluded that they might
have succeeded if only they had acted in unison. A Royal Commission in 1863, which investigated the roles of the
Academy and the watercolour societies, favoured the amalgamation of the two societies. Frederick Tayler,
President of the Old Water-Colour Society, resisted the move on the grounds that 'the one would not be willing to
admit its great inferiority to the other, and on equal terms a fusion could not fairly take place'. In 1878 the Art
journal recommended that the two societies should be combined to establish 'one great academy of British Water-
colour Art'. In 1881 the Institute 'aspired to nothing less than the consolidation of all water colourists worth taking
into account at all into an united body . .
.', but succeeded in incorporating the previously independent Dudley
Gallery rather than the Old Water-Colour Society. In 1882 the Art Journal concluded that 'there has probably
never been a time when the tension between the "Old Society" and "The Institute" has been so tightly drawn',

and so the unhappy relationship between the two went on.

During the 1870s, however, the Royal Academy became increasingly friendly to watercolourists and the
vetting committees for the Summer Exhibitions more disposed to see the merit of watercolours. In 1869 Fred
Walker had consoled his friend J.W. North, who had been passed over in the elections to the Old Water-Colour
Society, but whose work was accepted at the Academy, with the words: 'So that's all right, stick to it! I think I

would as soon be appreciated by the Academy in its present healthy tone, as by the W. Colour Society.' From the
mid-1880s the Academy devoted a gallery in the Summer Exhibition to watercolour painting, where small and
delicate works might be seen away from the distraction of larger-scale oil paintings.
As the exhibition space in the galleries of the two societies was restricted to a fixed number of members and
associates, at least until 1883, young watercolourists without established reputations were at a disadvantage. An
important event therefore was the first 'General Exhibition of Water-Colour Drawings' held in 1865 at the Dudley
Gallery in the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly. This was organized by a committee of artists and connoisseurs who,
according to the preface of the catalogue of their first exhibition,

had for their object the establishment of a gallery, which, while exclusively devoted to drawings as
distinguished from oil paintings, should not in its use by exhibitors involve membership of a society. These
two conditions are not at present fulfilled by any London exhibition. The water-colour societies reserve their

walls entirely for members, while those galleries which are comparatively open to all exhibitors (such as that
of the Royal Academy) afford but a limited and subordinate space to all works in other materials than oil.

The Art Journal applauded this 'boon to a great mass of water-colour artists'; and aspiring watercolourists, many
of whom had previously earned parlous livings as illustrators, sought to exhibit probationary watercolours in the
Dudley's annual exhibitions.
The Dudley was a runaway The Art Journal commented in 1868 that what had been 'when
success.
established, simply a necessity', was now 'looked upon
as one of the most interesting exhibitions of the year'. In

the years between its founding and the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877 the Dudley came to be regarded
as a refuge for both conservative and aesthetically advanced watercolourists, and for amateurs as well as
10. Samuel Palmer, OWS (1805-1881). Landscape with Windmill, Figures and Catth exhibited L851(?). Watercolour and bodycol
lodvcoiour, \vi th

scratching out, 53.7 x 75.6 cm. (21 '/s x 29% in. London, Bethnal Green Museum
I
26 PROFESSIONAL LIFE

professionals. The Dudley, because it was established on genuinely liberal principles and was accessible to all

watercolourists, supported many artists whose careers might otherwise have failed.

Distinct styles and subjects of watercolour were sometimes associated with the societies. The Art Journal
wrote in 1861:

The Old Water-Colour Society was originally a body of landscape painters, and the New began life as a
company of figure painters, by way of broad distinction from the senior body; but neither society has been
able to sustain the character it assumed, and which was originally given to it.

Samuel Palmer's Landscape with Windmill, Figures and Cattle (Plate 10) is. representative of the more
conservative type of landscape painting which came to dominate the Old Water-Colour Society in the 1850s. Its
imaginary and artificial character was prescribed by a tradition of landscape painting which descended from
Rembrandt and Jacob Ruysdael and which was assimilated into British art in the eighteenth century. Palmer's
watercolour, impressive in scale and technique though it may be, represents a preconceived vision of landscape
based on historical tradition rather than a fresh inquiry into the general or local features of the countryside.
The general conservatism of the Old Water-Colour Society did not preclude innovatory and startling
watercolours from being shown there. J. F. Lewis and William Henry Hunt were leading members. Edward Burne-
Jones was elected in 1864, and the figurative watercolours which he exhibited, although they met with a chilling

lack of appreciation, were amongst the most beautiful products of the interim phase of Pre-Raphaehtism. In the

1870s the Society was a meeting-place for the Idyllist group of watercolourists, of which Frederick Walker was the

leading member. But by the beginning of the last quarter of the century the Old Water-Colour Society had become
an entrenched bastion of old-fashioned ideas about painting.
The New Water-Colour Society, or Institute, was to some extent successful in attracting watercolourists
who addressed themselves to historical, biblical or literary subjects. Edward Henry Corbould's Saul and the Witch
of Endor (Plate 4) may be seen as an example of this type of painting. The Art journal described it as 'ambitious,
powerful, and well calculated to show the utmost capabilities of water-colour Art' in its review of the exhibition of
1860. In 1866, however, the Art Journal carpingly referred to the Institute as being 'notorious for pseudo high
Art'. Landscape was always represented at the Institute, and as the century proceeded a type of rustic scene with
sentimentally treated figures came to be associated with its exhibitions. At the end of century the Institute was
popular with many painters who were only occasional watercolourists and allowed more dramatic and innovatory
uses of the medium than the Society was willing to endorse.
The Dudley Gallery was more heterogeneous in its exhibitions than either of the societies; the lists of

contributors include the names of an extraordinary cross-section of artists who were to make brilliant reputations
for themselves later in the century. In the 1860s it provided an exhibition forum for various artists who followed
and admired Burne-Jones and in whose poignant Pre-Raphaelite-inspired works the dawn of the Aesthetic
Movement may be seen. Walter Crane and Robert Bateman and other Dudley artists painted mythological and
figure subjects of which the Art journal said in 1869: 'there is . . . dreaminess instead of definiteness, and
smudginess in place of sentiment.'

The Grosvenor Gallery somewhat stole the thunder of the Dudley, and certainly became the showplace of
Aesthetic painting. From its inception in 1877 the Grosvenor's proprietor Sir Coutts Lindsay invited watercolour-
ists to submit works, and provided a separate chamber where watercolours might be sympathetically hung and

appreciated. In the winter of 1880-1 the Gallery's exhibition devoted to watercolours by contemporary artists was
seen as competing with the exhibitions of the two societies.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century the argument over the relative importance of oil and
 PROFESSIONAL LIFE 27

watercolour lost currency. Each medium was accepted in its own right and the feeling of professional rivalry
between the protagonists died away. Although the Society and the Institute continued in business, and in fact

gained royal patronage in 1881 and 1883 respectively, members were less dependent on them at a time when there
were wider opportunities for the exhibition and sale of watercolours.

The late Victorian appetite for works of art gave rise to the Fine Art Society in 1875, and from the start

exhibitions of works for sale by contemporary watercolourists were held there. Established dealers like Agnew's
bought and sold watercolours by leading artists of the day, and put on annual exhibitions of drawings. The
Burlington Fine Arts Club staged memorial exhibitions of distinguished Victorian watercolourists. The principal
provincial cities benefited from academies and art societies which exhibited the works of artists who sought local

reputations. In Edinburgh the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Water-Colours was founded in 1878 on the
model of the Old Water-Colour Society, and the Royal Scottish Academy exhibited watercolours and included
watercolour specialists amongst its associates.

Women artists had their own association in the Society of Lady Artists, but most preferred to exhibit

alongside their male colleagues. Many were professionally successful, despite a restriction barring women from
full membership of the Old Water-Colour Society, which was enforced until 1890.

Certain artists enjoyed considerable prosperity as watercolour painters. Established figures commanded
large fees for their illustrative drawings. John Gilbert, who based his career on this trade, became a very rich
President of the Old Water-Colour Society and was knighted. Typical of the type of romantic-historical
watercolour that he exhibited is The Field of the Cloth of Gold (Plate 11). Other watercolourists supplemented
their income by teaching, and some found it hard to survive in their chosen metier. J.F. Lewis wrote in 1858 of the
despair he felt about earning his living by watercolour painting:

I work from before 9 in the morning till dusk, from half past six to 11 at night always, I think that speaks for
itself, and yet I swear I am £250 a year poorer for the last seven years . . . And for what? To get by water-
colour art £500 a year, and this, too, when I know that as an oil painter I could with less labour get my
thousand. (M. Lewis: John Frederick Lewis, 1978)

Lewis resigned the Presidency of the Old Water-Colour Society in 1858 and turned to the more remunerative
production of oil versions of his oriental subjects.
Different artists had their own ideas of how to succeed. Samuel Palmer thought that 'the only quite certain
way of making money by water-colours is, I fancy, to do such figures, fruit, and flowers as William Hunt did, and
to do them as well.' F.G. Stephens said of Hunt's money-making proclivities: '[He] was unable to resist the crackle

of crisp bank notes, a sound which mastered his strongest reluctance to part with a drawing he was loath to sell. ' In

1865 the Art journal wrote sarcastically of the commercial instincts of some members of the Old Water-Colour
Society:

Students of nature are content with the production of two or three well considered works, which have a value
in proportion to the thought expressed. But men who aspire to the display of seventeen frames, each one of
which is made tempting to the popular eye, must, we repeat, be of a higher order in creation than the mere
artist. It is obvious that, wise in their generation, they have gone to Birmingham and Manchester and have
learnt from manufacturers and political economists how to suit the market, and make the supply equal the
demand. We feel that the reproach often cast on the unthrift of the artist meets in these practices absolute
refutation.

Watercolourists strove to be regarded as the professional equals of contemporary oil painters, but without
28 PROFESSIONAL LIFE

complete success. In financial terms the majority of watercolourists struggled, whereas practically all members of

the Royal Academy, however mediocre their paintings, enjoyed reasonable prosperity. The relative unreward of
watercolour painting was a constant cause of grievance to its practitioners.

The frontier between professional and amateur artists was a closely drawn one. The status and self-esteem
of the former group, which were jealously guarded by the watercolour societies, were not readily achieved by
artists who did not need to sell works to earn their livings. Watercolour painting was, however, vastly popular
throughout a wide cross-section of society. Countless amateurs occupied their leisure hours by recording the
familiar domestic and landscape surroundings, although the reputations of only a few have survived. Watercolour
was a medium which aspiring artists could easily experiment with, simply because its practice did not depend on a

studio or elaborate equipment.

Instruction in the technical skills of watercolour painting was traditionally received from drawing
masters; Ruskin for example took lessons from J.D. Harding; and large groups of students would gather around
revered figures like David Cox in the hope of gaining informal tuition or some insight into the master's working
method. Dozens of instructional treatises were published during the nineteenth century and the courses they laid

out were presumably methodically followed by both professional and amateur painters. Ruskin's The Elements of
Drawing was written as a reply to the many requests for advice that, in the words of Cook and Wedderburn, he
received 'from all sorts and conditions of men and women, from humble students, otherwise unknown to him, and

from great ladies or dear friends'. Ruskin offered a lucid explanation of the technical methods of watercolour
painting and guided his students to types of subject in which, to borrow his phrase, 'the innocence of the eye' might
revel. The programme of this simple and poetic text followed the course that he had established in the landscape
school of the Working Men's College, where he had taught in the early 1850s. The Elements of Drawing circulated
very widely and was highly influential for at least quarter of a century.

Certain private schools gave part-time students the opportunity to meet and sketch or paint together. The
most informal and friendly of these was Leigh's in London, which later became Heatherley's School, and there at

least watercolour painting was not actively discouraged, as it was at the Royal Academy Schools. If formal art
education generally ignored watercolour as a medium young artists themselves occasionally gathered together to
organize their own curricula and to set themselves figurative and landscape subjects for sketching sessions.
To pursue any kind of voluntary training, however, required a degree of financial independence, and
young painters often faced the immediate necessity of earning their livings. In the middle years of the century
many of these found occasional work drawing designs on wood blocks which could then be engraved to provide

illustrations for books and magazines.

British social life underwent a gradual but fundamental transformation in this period. The arts were no
longer the domain of the aristocracy or court, but were instead adapted to appeal to the expectations, and to express
the moods and emotions, of a diverse and multiform community. For the first time in history a wealthy, self-

confident and culturally acquisitive middle class assumed responsibility for, and determined the character and
direction of, artistic developments.
Watercolour painting in particular depended on the support of the middle classes, whose newly built
houses required furnishing with pictures and whose cultural appreciations respected an artist's ability to represent
recognizable objects and transmit factual information. Moreover, they believed in an art that was pioneered by
artists of their own generation and nationality. Ruskin wrote with telling self-mockery when he described a

middle-class household's artistic requirements in Notes on Samuel Front and William Hunt (1879-80):

It is especially to be remembered that drawings of this simple character were made for these same middle
11. Sir John Gilbert, RA, PRWS (1817-1897). The Field of the Cloth of Gold, 1862. Watercolour and bodycolour, 48.3 x 66 cm.
(19 x 26 in.) Private collection
30 PROFESSIONAL LIFE

classes, exclusively; The great people always bought Canaletto, not Prout, and Van Huysum, not Hunt.
. . .

There was indeed no quality in the bright little water-colours which could look other than pert in ghostly
corridors, and petty in halls of state; but they gave an unquestionable tone of liberal-mindedness to a
suburban villa, and were the cheerfullest possible decorations for a moderate-sized breakfast-parlour opening
on a nicely-mown lawn.

Ruskin and many of his contemporaries believed that watercolour painting was a valuable and important activity,
the artistic achievements of which contributed to general happiness, education and spiritual refreshment. The
aesthetics and purpose of the medium were endlessly discussed in newspapers^and journals, and praise and
criticism was freely given. On the whole, the works that were exhibited were seen as demonstrating the zenith of
watercolourists' technical and imaginative powers. Even if the Victorian art establishment regarded watercolour as
beyond the academic pale, the medium still attracted many good artists and evoked much loyalty in its admirers.
3THE ROMANTIC INHERITANCE

hotchpotch of
colourists
artistic

were content to abstract

E larly

and compose their subjects according

Victorian watercolour painting incorporated a
conventions, and at the same time pioneered startling aesthetic advances. Many
to earlier pictorial practices. Others,
water-

however, embarked on an objective investigation into the essential qualities of materials, and discovered new
technical means whereby they might record the appearance of the physical world.

Two great romantic artists, Turner and Cox, were in the prime of their careers in the 1840s. Both exerted
influence upon the careers of watercolourists, who deliberately or unconsciously sought to emulate their styles of
painting. However, and perhaps surprisingly, the general pattern of Victorian watercolour painting was not
foretold in the work of either.
Turner's art was interpreted in a variety of ways during the later years of his life and after his death.

Ruskin acclaimed the brilliant and elaborate watercolours of his great hero's middle years in which a constant
variety of surface textures suggests minute detail to the eye - a technical device seen by Ruskin as the link between
Turner and Pre-Raphaelitism. But very few Victorians sought to emulate the scale and drama of Turner's
compositions. As for the colour studies and abstract arrangements of shape with which he experimented in old age,
these remained unknown to artists at large until the late 1850s, and were appreciated only by a generation which
independently considered the way in which the eye responds to the harmonies of spatial proportion and
conjunction of colour. Thus Turner's influence on succeeding generations was disparate and sporadic; artists as
different as Birket Foster and Whistler were indebted to the compositional and technical examples that he set. For
many other students of watercolour, 'This greatest of all landscape painters' was, in the words of Alfred William
Rich, 'a cause of stumbling and disaster.'
David Cox was relatively more accessible to younger artists than Turner, and many owed their first
allegiance to him, although their styles of painting subsequently diverged from his. As the true modernity of
Cox's watercolours was only gradually understood his influence proved long lasting: even in the later years of the
nineteenth century certain painters considered themselves heirs to a tradition of painting established by Cox.
If the examples of Turner and Cox perplexed their Victorian admirers and seemed to offer an uncertain
stylistic direction, other watercolourists of the romantic generation made sensational advances in the 1830s and
1840s, and were applauded as the geniuses of the future.
William Henry Hunt was amongst the pioneers of the use of opaque bodycolour; he perhaps more than
any other painter was influential in leading younger artists to adopt its use whenever finish and detail were sought.
In addition, Hunt invented new subjects which were in turn adopted by his followers, and in doing so he led the
general diversification towards genres other than landscape. He saw no impropriety in subjects of contemporary
rustic life. In The Outhouse (Plate 12) he painted his wife Sarah standing with a jaunty air at the doorway of a shed.
 ' '

32 THE ROMANTIC INHERITANCE

The wooden beams, barrel and hen-coops, and the boards and wattle from which the building is constructed, are
wonderfully drawn in their haywire disorder, but they remain a foil to the model's compelling and provocative
gaze. William Makepeace Thackeray wrote: If you want to see real nature, now, real expression, real startling
home poetry, look at every one of Hunt's heads.' Hunt invested his modern-life subjects with a realism which
allows the viewer to explore minutely the contents of an interior, and which gives a direct sense of communication
with the figures. This psychological intuition was emulated by watercolounsts right through the century.
While Hunt was occasionally humorous in his choice of modern-life subjects, many of his followers were
overtly sentimental. Frederic Shields, who gained both his technical proficiency and his fondness for rustic
subjectsfrom Hunt's example, introduced a quality of winsome charm to his watercolours of children, such as The
Holly Gatherers (Plate 13). Amongst the most sympathetic portrayers of children was Alfred Downing Fripp, who
by approaching closely to his adolescent subjects allows the viewer to participate in their childish antics and
excitements. In Watching the Porpoises (Plate 14) he described the expressions of carefree delight of a group of
boys perched on a weed-strewn rock. As was the case with Hunt's watercolours of children the subject is directly

conveyed; the forthright expressions and gesticulations of the boys involve the spectator. Frederick Burton's
watercolour Dreams (Half-title) is a study of an invalid child, who holds a spray of columbine. The fine stipple of

its technique relates it to Hunt's tradition.

W.H.Hunt's most famous invention in terms of subject-matter were the still-lifes of fruit, flowers and
birds' nests which he exhibited regularly from 1830. In their microscopic detail and meticulous depiction of the
different species of fauna and flora these anticipate Pre-Raphaelite landscape painting of the 1850s and 1860s. In
fact, Ruskin, who admired Hunt's still-lifes enormously, and many other contemporaries, regarded them as

microcosms of landscape and judged them by the criterion of truth to nature which was applied to landscape

painting. A reviewer in the Art Journal in 1854 noted that his drawings 'are copied from pieces of judiciously
selected way-side turf, cut out by the yard, and kept in living freshness for a month.
Hunt gained his sobriquet 'Bird's Nest Hunt' from watercolours like Chaffinch Nest and May Blossom
(Plate 15). In this tour de force his various technical resources may be identified. Chinese White was used for the
highlights of reflected light, in for example the glossy may leaves; and also mixed with pigments to make the entire
composition rich in tone and opaque in colour. Occasionally Hunt used layers of Chinese White as a primer on to
which touches of pure colour might be stippled to gain even greater brilliance and luminositv.
Ruskin regarded Hunt as the best model to recommend to students of watercolour painting. 'Study the
works of William Hunt', he commanded and: 'When you have time, practise the production of mixed tints by
interlaced touches of the pure colours out of which they are formed, and use the process at the parts of your
sketches where you wish to get rich and luscious effects.' The virtuosity of handling of Hunt's still-life and
figurative watercolours was appreciated by subsequent generations of artists - Birket Foster and Fred Walker were
amongst his greatest admirers - and he was the idol of the Victorian watercolour-collecting public. Towards the
end of his life, however, he lamented: 'I still work hard at grapes and apples but 1 wish persons would like the

drawings as bits of colour instead of something nice to eat.

Hunt's ability to describe the literal appearance of his subjects appealed to an age of scientific investigation

and classification. His still-lifes are extraordinary for their realism and accuracy; the varieties of his specimens, as

well as their blemishes and imperfections, are minutely and conscientiously observed.
A not dissimilar spirit of exploration, although of a geographical and anthropological kind, pervaded the
watercolour painting of John Frederick Lewis. His technical innovations were as remarkable as those of
W. H. Hunt, and he was equally dependent on the use of bodycolour to manipulate the minute detail and to control
the balance of light and shade. Easter Day at Rome ( Plate 16) - the last watercolour he exhibited at the Old Water-
12.William Henry Hunt, OWS (1790-1864). The Outhouse, 1838. Watercolour and bodycolour. 54 x 74.9 cm. (2114 X 29V2 in.
Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum
13. Frederic lames Shields, ARWS (1833-1911). The Holly Gatherers, 1858. Watercolour and bodycolour, 48 x 33.6 cm.
(18% x 13 1
/) in.) University of Manchester, Whitworth Art Gallery
14. Alfred Downing Fripp, RWS (1822-1895). Watching the Porpoises, 1863. Watercolour, 58.4 x 41.6 cm.
(23 x 16Vs in.) London, Bcthnal Green Museum
 '

36 THE ROMANTIC INHERITANCE

Colour Society prior to the ten years that he spent in voluntary exile from English artistic life - represents a

departure from the conventions of early nineteenth-century watercolour painting. Vastly elaborate in its detail

and complex in its variety of conflicting and subsidiary subjects, it was the consummation of Lewis's early career,
and a fulfilment of the new criteria by which exhibited watercolours were judged.
J.F. Lewis left London for the East in 1840 and adopted the guise of an Ottoman aristocrat. Thackeray
visited him in the Ezbekiya district of Cairo and described how he lived 'like a languid Lotus-eater - a dreamy,
hazy, lazy, tobaccofied life. He was away from evening-parties, he said; he needn't wear white kid-gloves or
starched neckcloths, or read a newspaper.' He lived in a 'long, queer, many-windowed, many-galleried house'
with an 'open court with a covered gallery running along one side of it'. The unfinished Courtyard of the Painter's
House (Plate 17) shows this princely residence.

Lewis was so long away and so completely out of touch, that in 1848 the Society withdrew his name from
its list of members. However, when he began to exhibit the watercolours that he had painted in the East, or those

that he worked up from sketches that he brought back to England, he caused a sensation. His works revealed a
gorgeous and exotic world to a vastly intrigued public, and his ability to portray people and landscapes with the
utmost naturalism met with a delighted response.

Amongst the most beautiful of all Victorian watercolours are the oriental interiors which Lewis painted.
Hhareem Life, Constantinople (Plate 18) has a certainty of construction within the carefully measured
perspectives of walls, window and upholstered bench which reminds one of the paintings of Vermeer. The
psychological structure of the watercolour is as carefully controlled as its composition. The Art Journal described it
at length on the occasion of its exhibition at the Old Water-Colour Society in 1857:

two figures - one, the khanum, odalisque, or what you will, [who] reclines in a corner at the extremity of the
divan, in the profound listlessness of oriental life. The casement is open, and she is playing with a cat, holding
over it a feather-fan, from which the animal has torn portions of the feathers . . . The attendant stands in

profile, being seen at half-length; and beyond her is hung a glass inclined forward, in which her head is

repeated.

A motionless cycle of expectation is described: the cat languidly pauses before striking again at the fan; the
mistress is distracted by her game from commanding the servant who awaits her pleasure; and outside the picture
space another attendant, whose legs and feet only are visible in the looking glass, silently plays a part. 'That

patience is inestimable', continued the Art journal, 'which can execute the monotonous arabesque on the wall
whereon the glass hangs, or even the shawl round the waist of the lady - the last touch as mechanically accurate as

the first.

Theophile Gautier, who admired Lewis's watercolours at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855, wrote:
'Mr Lewis combines chinese patience with persian delicacy in the execution of his silks and embroideries. ' Lewis's
oriental watercolours are the epitome of the mid-Victorian desire for apparently effortless finish and sumptuous
richness of colour and tone. Commentators recognized the untold hours of laborious effort that went into them as

well as the supreme technical skill.

The Victorian concept of pictorial realism was fulfilled and defined by the watercolours of William Henry
Hunt and John Frederick Lewis. Although the urge to mirror nature was taken up by the Pre-Raphaelites, the
works of Hunt and Lewis were never exceeded for their minute accuracy. Never before had artists so directly
revealed their subjects to the scrutiny of the viewer, or so conscientiously addressed themselves to the process of
that depiction.
15. William Henry Hunt, OWS (1790-1864). Chaffinch Nest and May Blossom. Watercolour and bodycolour, 24.1 x 37.5 cm.
(9V2 x 14% in. London, Courtauld Institute Galleries (Witt Collection)
|
16. John Frederick Lewis, RA (1805-1876). Easter Day at Rome, 1840. Watercolour and bodvcolour, 76.8 x 133.3 cm.
(30 1/} X 52V2 in.) Sunderland Museum and Art Gallery
17. John Frederick Lewis, RA (1805-1876). Courtyard of the Painter's House (otherwise known as The House of Shaikh
Amin-Al-Suhaimi, Barb-Al-Asfar, Cairo). Watercolour and bodycolour, 96.2 x 126 cm. (37 7/s X 49% in.)
Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery
 bodycolour,
Constantinople, ex hibited 1857. Watercolour and
18. John Frederick Lewis, RA (1805-1876). Hhareem Lite,
x 3/4 in.) Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Laing Art Gallery
62.2 x 47.6 cm. (241
: 18
19. Richard Dadd (1817-1886). The Artist's Halt in the Desert, c. 1845. Watercolour and bodycolour, 37 x 70.7 cm.
(14V2 X 27% in.) Private collection
20. Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys (1829-1904). A Panoramic View of Hunworth, c. 1850. Watercolour, 26.7 x 41.9 cm.
(IOV2 X I6V2 in.) Private collection

1
 THE ROMANTIC INHERITANCE 43

Richard Dadd's approach was different; he transcended conventional naturalism, and rather combined an
occasionally frenzied imaginative approach with minutely observed realism. He sought obsessively to observe and
record the actual and concrete appearance of things, perhaps as a means of defence against a threatening outside

world. His works, even when apparently straightforward representations of places and people, must be seen in the
context of his mental instability and eventual madness.
Dadd travelled to the Holy Land in the party of the Welsh lawyer Sir Thomas Phillips in 1842. David
Roberts had recommended Dadd to the entourage on the grounds that 'the young artist's powers as a
draughtsman, and his amiable qualities as a man, would render him as charming in companionship as he would be
efficient as an artist.' Dadd described the arduous journey that Phillips's party made in exploration of the

topography of the New Testament in a letter to William Powell Frith:

We visited Nazareth, we saw the Sea of Galilee, we stayed at Tiberias, we sojourned at Carmel, we have seen
the Holy City with all its sights, we have been to Bethlehem, and gone to Jericho, to the Jordan, the Dead Sea,
and the convent of St. Saba, through the wild passes of Engaddi by moonlight.

His watercolour The Artist's Halt in the Desert (Plate 19) shows the party of European travellers, dressed in long
coats or capes and wearing tall hats or caps, encamped close to the shores of the Dead Sea. In his letter to Frith, he
told how the party was forced to wait for two hours for the moon to rise before proceeding by its light into the

mountains. Of the Arab servants he noted 'Their romantic, : erratic, latronatic, Arabic character was much assisted

by the fire round which we sat . .

.'

In The Artist's Halt Dadd has transposed the traditional planar format and nocturnal luminosity of The
Flight into Egypt as conceived by Adam Elsheimer in the early seventeenth century, to a secular and surreal
purpose. Dadd's idiosyncratic watercolour technique, whereby areas of even colour are hatched with strokes of
darker tone to give vibrant textures, was not conducive to literal representation. But the moonlit landscape and
night sky which provide the setting for The Artist's Halt give a profound and timeless significance to the subject.
Frederick Sandys's A Panoramic View of Hunivorth (Plate 20) was made as a record of a familiar locality at

the request of a Norfolk naturalist and antiquarian, the Rev. James Bulwer. The simplicity of its composition
reveals the affection for and patient observation of a particular place; the balance of its elements, and the
opportunity provided by buildings in the foreground to lead the eye into the distance, are fortuitous rather than
contrived. The technique, free of bodycolour or white highlights, is unspectacular but honest. The sensitivity of

his adaptation of the East Anglian watercolour tradition of Cotman and Crome make Sandys's View of Hunworth a

remarkable commencement in a career in which he only occasionally painted landscape subjects.

The 1840s were for watercolourists years of optimism and innovation. Progressive artists consistently

sought greater naturalism in their works, and watercolours were judged by their degrees of realism. It was a period
when ideas about the means and objectives of watercolour painting were being contested, and the diversity of its

achievements reflected this debate.

21. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882). Arthur's Tomb (otherwise known as Sir Launcelot parting from Guenevere), 1854. VVatercolour,
22.9 x 36.8 cm. (9 x 14V; in.) London, British Museum
4 THE PRE-RAPHAELITES

ideas about painting, and a spirit of self-reliance and

T
reverberated through Europe, marked the commencement of an important era
JLhe
,he year 1848,

a belief in
when political upheaval and revolution
in English art: a

the possibility of change, led in that year to the

ferment of new

formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

What at first may have seemed an obscure and forlorn faction within the wide spectrum of English
painting resulted in its successive phases in an artistic reformation, first in the interests of realism and objectivity,
and later in the expression of an intense and compelling romanticism. For twenty years the principal painters of
this curiously named group, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, were central
to the advancement of English art. The aims of the movement were adapted by many later painters - sometimes to
conflicting and contradictory purposes - and remained current until the end of the Victorian age.
The multitudinous forms which Pre-Raphaelitism took were echoed and inspired by John Ruskin, who
became the principal theorist and advocate of the movement. The five volumes of Modern Painters, begun as a
defence of Turner's painting and published between 1843 and 1860, contain general analyses of artistic principles
and objectives as well as Ruskin's heartfelt admonitions to contemporary artists. He pleaded that they 'should go
to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thoughts but
how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instruction; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and
scorning nothing; believing all things to be right and good, and rejoicing always in the truth. ' The wider context of
Ruskin's ordinance makes clear that this apprenticeship to Nature should be a formative training for all painters,
rather than simply a code for landscape painters. The less familiar words that concluded the first volume were:

Then, when their memories are stored, and their imaginations fed, and their hands firm, let them take up the
scarlet and the gold, give the reins to their fancy, and show us what their heads are made of. . They have
. .

placed themselves above our criticism, and we will listen to their words in all faith and humility; but not
unless they themselves have before bowed, in the same submission, to a higher Authority and Master.

Of the three principal members of the Brotherhood only Rossetti was primarily a watercolourist. Millais

used watercolour for illustrations and studies but considered oil, which he handled with great virtuosity, more
appropriate for finished paintings. Holman Hunt painted brilliant landscapes in watercolour.
In the overall context of Pre-Raphaelitism the advocates of watercolour shared the belief that the medium
was appropriate to all categories of subject, including that which academical theory and Ruskin considered the
highest in value and importance: namely the Bible, mythology, literature and history painting. Pre-Raphaelite
figurative watercolours, whether based on literary imaginings or historical fact, are concerned with the emotions.
The scenes of confrontation and separation, and the moods of happiness and despair, are depicted with dramatic
46 THE PRE-RAPHAELITES

force and were subjects deeply felt by those who painted them. They were the fulfilment of Ruskin's belief that

artists should go beyond dutiful naturalism to themes in which they might exercise their imaginations to explore
and describe human passions and predicaments.
Rossetti, who had previously struggled to master the techniques of oil painting, began in the early 1850s to
explore the possibilities of painting ornate and richly coloured watercolours in which he might express his
romantic fascination with the Middle Ages. He immersed himself in the literature which described the fantastic
and ritualized events of medieval history, and was particularly drawn to Malory's Mortc d' Arthur, which made a

vast impression on the artist's febrile imagination.

Arthur's Tomb (Plate 21) was the first of his series of Arthurian subjects. It describes by the concerted
means of compositional drama and complex symbolism the tragic meeting of Queen Guenevere and Sir Launcelot
after the death of King Arthur. Guenevere, in her mortification, refuses Launcelot a last kiss.

Medievalism and the Mortc d' Arthur linked the group of artists who set the pattern for the second impulse
of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Edward Burne-Jones and his friend William Morris regarded the book as 'one of
their most precious treasures: so precious that even among their intimates there was some shyness over it, till a

year later they heard Rossetti speak of it and the Bible as the two greatest books in the world, and their tongues
were unloosed by the sanction of his authority.'

The most elegant watercolour to be inspired by the Mortc d' Arthur was Burne-Jones's Green Summer
(Plate 23); although the subject of the watercolour was thematic rather than documentary, the title echoes a

passage in Malory's poem where 'true love is summer' and which tells how 'winter rasure doth always
likened to
erase and deface green summer, so fareth it by unstable love in man and woman.'
The picture evokes a mood of tranquil absorption by, and meditation upon, the words of poetry that are
being read. Seven women, draped in green and sitting in a wooded landscape, are listening to an eighth figure, who
is dressed in black. Little more can be said about the actual subject; a calm and restful air seems to pervade the scene

which was described by Burne-Jones's painter friend Edward Clifford as 'the flower and quintessence of summer'.
However, the sentiment of the watercolour is equivocal. Burne-Jones subtly evoked the true gist of Malory's
verses and introduced a mood of wistful regret for the passing of summer days.
Green Summer combines the calm and balance of classical sculpture with the decorous elegance and
concealed emotion of Giorgione's paintings. The quality of its construction, in its figurative elements and
draperies, and its landscape and atmosphere, and the simple yet mysterious subject which it describes, make it both
a beautiful and disturbing watercolour. Burne-Jones painted Green Summer in 1864 at a time in his life when he

had many reasons to be happy. He was recently married (the female figures in the watercolour are loosely
modelled on his wife Georgiana, her sisters, and other friends of theirs, including Jane Morris), and his election to

the Old Water-Colour Society at least indicated that he was gaining renown as a painter. He exhibited the picture
at the Society a year later and it is perhaps true to say that no more original or challenging watercolour was ever
shown there.
In their treatment of literary, biblical or mythological subjects the Pre-Raphaelites placed great
importance on the careful representation of setting and incidental detail, as well as on the dramatic action described
in the original text.

Both detail and emotional drama are important in Ford Madox Brown's Elijah and the Widow's Son
(Plate 22). The event is taken from the Book of Kings I in the Old Testament where the Prophet brings back to life a

young boy. When Brown exhibited the oil version in 1865 he gave a long account of the significance and
symbolism of the different parts of the composition. He described how he had carefully researched the grave-
clothes and floral adornments of the child, 'without [which], the subject (the coming to life) could not be expressed
22. Ford Madox Brown U821-1893J. Elijah and the Widow's Son, 1864. VVatercolour and bodycolour,
heightened with gum arabic, 39.4 x 25.4 cm. (15 /; x 10 in. Private collection
1
I
23. SirEdward Coley Burne-Jones, Bart., ARA, RWS (1833-1898). Green Summer, 1864. Watercolour and bodycolour,
28.9 X 48.3 cm. (llVs X 19 in.) Private collection
24. Sir Edward Colcy Burne-Jones, Bart., ARA, RWS
(1833-1898). Phyllis and Demophoon, 1870.
Watercolour and bodycolour, 91.4 X 45.7 cm.
(36 X 18 in.) Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery
 '

50 THE PRE-RAPHAELITES

by the painter's art'. The bird returning to its nest - 'consisting of the bottle which in some countries is inserted in
the walls to secure the presence of the swallow of good omen' - was a symbol of the return of the child's soul.
Further account is given of the Hebraic inscriptions over the door, the widow's costume and the preparations which
she has been making for the Prophet's supper. No element is unconsidered or left to chance and herein lies a clue to
the diligence and commitment of Pre-Raphaelite painters to the means by which a story might be told.
Ford Madox Brown had been commissioned to prepare an illustration of Elijah and the Widow's Son for
Dalziel's Bible Gallery, which was to consist of a volume of plates of biblical subjects. The fact that he then

proceeded to work up oil and watercolour versions of the composition was because of the value and importance that
he attached to his pictorial solution to the difficulties of describing the scene, rather than because of any particular
demand for religious subjects. Christian iconography was familiar to a wide audience and many Victorians were
intrigued by the parallels between events in the Old and New Testaments. However, Victorian watercolours were
seldom adapted to a didactic purpose, and moral or religious instruction rarely obtruded.
Mythological subjects were similarly appreciated by those for whom the events and characters of Greek
and Roman mythology were recognizable or familiar. The appeal of such themes was enhanced by the mood of
religious scepticism current during the second half of the century, and by the new agnosticism in artistic and
literary circles.

Burne-jones took the subject of Phyllis and Demophoon (Plate 24) from the Heroides of Ovid. He depicts
the moment when Demophoon embraces almond tree into which his lover Phyllis, the Queen of
the barren
Thrace, has been transformed, and blossom springs from its branches. Burne-jones treated the theme of the sad

consequences of mismatched love at a time when his own emotions were in disarray. The model for Phyllis was a
girl called Maria Zambaco, with whom he was deeply in love.

Burne-Jones's decision to exhibit Phyllis and Demophoon at the Old Water-Colour Society led to a crisis
when objection was made to the nudity of the male figure. He withdrew the watercolour from the exhibition and
resigned his membership. In the conservative opinion of most fellow-painters and of a large proportion of the
gallery-going public, Burne-Jones's watercolours were technically aberrant and obscure in subject. In 1865 the Art
journal had expressed the majority's view when a reviewer wrote: 'At the outset we confess ourselves one of the
uninitiate multitude who are wholly unworthy of the rare revelation of which Mr. Jones is the favoured recipient.
Burne-jones was hurt by the philistine ridicule with which his mythological watercolours were met and from 1873
to 1877 he withdrew from public artistic life.

Victorian watercolour painting aroused strong feelings, both enthusiastic and indignant, amongst a wide
community. Rossetti was so contemptuous of public opinion that he never allowed his works to be exhibited. In

general, the watercolours of historical subjects painted by Rossetti, and by Ford Madox Brown and Burne-jones,
were relatively little known beyond the immediate circle of friends and sympathisers that attached itself to the Pre-
Raphaelite movement. Their esoteric nature had limited appeal; and their inconsistent moral tone disconcerted the
sense of probity of the Victorian middle classes.
However, the Pre-Raphaelites shared a more general Victorian preoccupation with the patterns of their
own lives, and believed that the contemporary scene and setting was a fit subject for painting. The scenes of

modern life and the views of urban and rural landscapes which they depicted are as important and original as their
historical and literary subjects. For the first time, the inconsequential events and feelings of ordinary people were
considered worthy of record.
Rossetti's Writing on the Sand (Plate 25) was a heartfelt and personal soliloquy on the theme of romantic
love. A young couple are represented walking hand in hand on a beach in summer. It is unique amongst Rossetti's
watercolours in showing figures in contemporary dress; the girl wears a black shawl, in which she has folded a
25.Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882). Writing on the Sand, ]859. Watercolour and bodycolour, 26.7 x 24.2 cm. |10>: x 9 !
: in. I

London, British Museum

52 THE PRE-RAPHAELITES

straw hat, and a blueskirt, and her crinoline petticoat is momentarily exposed by a gust of wind. She watches with

passive demeanour as her companion draws her portrait in the sand. Rossetti painted the watercolour for a
beautiful young actress called Ruth Herbert whom he admired. It is possible that the girl has been given her
features; he perhaps identified with the young man who, tongue-tied and bashful, has found an ingenious means
of expressing his infatuation.
Rossetti had difficulties with the background of Writing on the Sand and sought advice from a landscape
artist. His friend George Price Boyce wrote in his diary: 'Rossetti called and borrowed 2 sketches of mine on the
coast of Babbacombe as a help to background of a delicate little drawing of a loving couple on a sea beach on a windy
day he is doing for Miss Herbert.'
Burne-Jones seldom painted landscape for its own sake, but occasionally made studies from which he could
work up landscape details in his figurative subjects. His Landscape with Willows and Poplars (Plate 26) was a
preparatory sketch for Green Summer.
However, the genre of landscape painting was an important one for many Pre-Raphaelite watercolourists.
Views of the outside world, whether they show an inhabited environment or scenery unmarked by man, reveal the
excitement that painters felt about their surroundings. Dadd and Lewis had painted oriental subjects because they
were attracted by the life that was led in the cities and deserts of the Middle East, and shared the romantic
fascination that this exotic world held for European imaginations. The Pre-Raphaelites who travelled to the Holy
Land did so with the self-conscious objectives of studying the biblical history of its landscape. For Holman Hunt,
who dismissed J.F. Lewis as 'the painter of Egyptian social scenes', the purpose of painting in the East was to give
an archaeological and symbolic record of the hallowed places of the Bible and to provide material for Christians
meditating on the events of the Old and New Testaments.
In The Plain of Rephaim from Mount Zion (Plate 27) Holman Hunt has given both coded and apparent
information about the historical importance of the landscape. He included in the foreground the figure of a man
who shields two children from stone-throwing boys, a detail which has been interpreted as a symbol of King
David's defence of the Children of Israel. Thus a rhapsodic account of a mountainous and desert landscape was
turned into a metaphor of biblical history. The vantage-point from which he studied the panorama of the Plain of
Rephaim was on Mount Zion, close to the site of The Last Supper. The stupendous colours of the landscape; the

brilliant yellows and greens of scrubby vegetation against the burnt umbers and oranges of the arid countryside,

the long purple shadows of the distances, and the brightly sunlit foreground, recall the profound impression that
the beauty of the scene had made on him.
Holman Hunt had travelled from London to Cairo in 1854 to join his friend Thomas Seddon. The two
painters worked together; Hunt prohibited Seddon from sketching, but introduced him to the Pre-Raphaelite

method of painting finished watercolours direct from the study of landscape.

Seddon shared Hunt's belief in the mystical importance of the biblical landscape. In Jerusalem, to which
place the two travelled in June, Seddon felt that he was 'treading upon holy ground'. When he returned to Europe
in October 1854 he had completed a superb oil of Jerusalem (Tate Gallery) and several watercolours of the city and
its environs. In The Hills of Moab (Plate 28) he has observed the moment when the shadowed valley became
immersed in penumbral purple: the sky beyond the distant hills, which are seen in the direct light of the setting

sun, is a strange green; the impression is one of a landscape weirdly transformed by the effect of vespertine light.

The interest that Pre-Raphaelite watercolourists took in the events of modern life was spurred by the
exodus of population from the countryside and the consequent expansion of the towns and cities. Both rural and
urban landscapes were painted; the former in a spirit of determined rejection of city life and urbanization; the
latter as a record of the surroundings in which the majority had their existence.
26. SirEdward Coley Burne-Jones, Bart., ARA, RW5 (1833-1898). Landscape with Willows and Poplars, c. 1864. Watercolour and
bodycolour, 19.3 x 43.2 cm. (7 5/s X 17 in.) Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery
27. William Holman Hunt, OM, RW5 (1827-1910). The Plain of Rephaim from Mount Zum, 1855. Watercolour and bodycolour,
35.6 X 50.8 cm. (14 X 20 in.) University of Manchester, Whitworth Art Gallery
28. Thomas Seddon (1821-1856). The Hills of Moab and the Valley of Hinnom, c. 1854. Watercolour and bodycolour,
30.3 X 22.9 cm. (11% x 9 in.) Oxford, Ashmolean Museum
29. Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893). Hampstead - A Sketch from
Nature (otherwise known as Hampstead from my Window), 1857.
Watercolour, 14 X 22.9 cm. (5Vz x 9 in.) Delaware Art Museum,
Marv R. Bancroft Memorial

30. Albert Joseph Moore, ARWS (1841-1893). Study of an Ash Trunk,

1857. Watercolour and bodycolour, heightened with gum arable,
30.3 x 22.9 cm. (11% X 9 in.) Oxford, Ashmolean Museum
31. John Ruskin, HRWS (1819-1900). In the Pafs of Killiecrankie, 1857. Watercolour and bodycolour, with pencil and ink, 28. x 24.8 cm.
(H'/h X 9 3/4 in.) Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum
58 THE PRE-RAPHAELITES

In Hampstead- A Sketch from Nature (Plate 29) Ford Madox Brown brought Pre-Raphaelite intensity of
colour and meticulous detail to bear on the verdure of the salubrious suburb, as it own house in
appeared from his
Kentish Town. When Ruskin inquired of Brown's An English Autumn Afternoon (Birmingham Museums and
Art Gallery), which is an oil counterpart to the watercolour, 'What made you take such a very ugly subject [?]',

Brown stubbornly replied 'Because it lay out of a back window.' In this response to Ruskin's provocation Brown
was insisting on the usefulness of painting scenes the very significance of which lay in their familiarity to the

Victorian middle-class families who lived in the once countrified villages of North London.
Brown did not arrange the composition of his watercolour, which is also known by the title Hampstead
from my Window. The relatively high viewpoint allows a partly obscured but intriguing perspective of
Hampstead, the parish church of which is seen beyond the expanse of Hampstead Heath. Buildings and trees in the
foreground conceal the depths of the landscape from view, and are broken by the edges of the composition.
Overlapping screens of contrasting texture and substance make up the dense and crowded subject.
The precepts and technical devices of Pre-Raphaelite watercolourists were perhaps most completely
demonstrated in the pure landscapes they painted. Ruskin paid homage to the laws of Nature by investigating the
precise botanical and geological character of materials. In The Elements of Drawing he described some of the types
of landscape which he most enjoyed, and which he felt would repay students of watercolour:

In general, all banks are beautiful things, and will reward work better than large landscapes. If you live in a

lowland country, you must look for places where the ground is broken to the river's edges, with decayed
posts, or roots of trees; . . . Nearly every other mile of road in chalk country will present beautiful bits of

broken bank at its sides; better in form and colour than high chalk cliffs. In woods, one or two trunks, with
the flowery ground below, are at once the richest and easiest kind of study: a not very thick trunk, say nine
inches or a foot in diameter, with ivy running up it sparingly, is an easy, and always a rewarding subject.

Ruskin created a type of watercolour which described a face of the countryside which a naturalist or painter might
discover if he explored on his hands and knees. His studies of lichenous rock and invading vegetation are without
human or topographical references. The drama of his compositions derives from the elemental forces which
constantly break down and reconstitute the physical landscape.
In the Pass of Killiecrankie (Plate 31) offers only a glimpse of a more distant landscape and horizon.
Practically no orientation to the outside world is permitted, and only the surface of water in the immediate
foreground allows the viewer to reckon the angle and range of vision. The eye is forced to explore the torn face of
rock and encroaching heather, which make a dense and almost abstract pattern in Ruskin's pictorial form.
In the late 1850s, and particularly following the publication of The Elements of Drawing in 1857, many

watercolourists painted minute studies of landscape. For example, Albert Moore, a painter who had no connections
with the Pre-Raphaelite circle, painted Study of an Ash Trunk (Plate 30), a watercolour which has been described
as 'a study of foliage as microscopically close as anything done in the Pre-Raphaelite sphere'. The correspondence
between Ruskin's suggestions as to landscape subjects and the young Moore's watercolour is clear.

The intent devotion with which watercolourists scrutinized the countenance of nature is a measure of the

originality of the Pre-Raphaelites. The spirit of inquiry and the search for information about the world around
them were characteristic of a generation who questioned both the scientific and the artistic basis of man's most
fundamental relation with nature. Watercolourists were forced to search for new technical means to satisfy their
urge to record the appearance of things with the utmost realism, and came to see the physical world, either by
direct observation or through the medium of their imaginations, with fresh eyes. Pre-Raphaelite watercolours
reflect the objectivity and immediacy of that vision.
 .

5THE PRE-RAPHAELITE SUCCESSION

became the dominant

detailed
style of painting
and brightly coloured representation of
amongst landscape
D
specific
uring the later 1850s and 1860s Pre-Raphaelitism
painters. Many of the watercolourists
and closely observed subjects were friends of the members
who adopted the

of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but some had had no contact with the original protagonists and joined the
movement by a process of stylistic osmosis. Roget wrote of the years of J. F. Lewis's presidency of the Old Water-
Colour Society, 1855—8:

The larger style of composition practised by the earlier artists was becoming less of an aim to a new
generation brought up under the teaching of Ruskin and impressed by the doctrines of the pre-Raphaelite
school. In its place a minutely realistic imitation of nature was now upheld as a nobler object of ambition.

Pre-Raphaelite landscape painting took for its principal subject-matter the range of natural phenomena:
mountains and hillsides and their geological constructions; rivers and streams and the flow of water; and lowland
landscapes rich in woodland and flowers.
The countryside was a place of retreat for Victorian artists; landscape watercolourists often spent the
summer making sketches from which finished works could be built up, or working on more elaborate subjects in

the open air. Amongst the favourite sketching-grounds were Bettws-y-Coed in Wales and Bngnal Banks in

Yorkshire. Other more solitary artists explored the landscape on their own, staying at wayside inns or in rented

cottages. Successful watercolourists, like Birket Foster, bought or built country houses and invited their artist

friends to stay, or even persuaded them to move close by to form artists' communities.
Many artists worked in the open air and experienced the sensations of landscape directly. In 1866 the Art
journal commended 'the growing habit of painting out of doors; hence the open daylight, the sunshine, and even
the breeze now brought within a picture'. However, while a sense of atmosphere was valued, transient effects of
weather were not allowed to mask the physical characteristics of the scenery. Bright light and clear distances, in
which the utmost definition was allowed, are the common climatic conditions of the Pre-Raphaelite landscape.
Barbara Bodichon's Ventnor, Isle of Wight (Plate 32), exceptional in its scale and vigorous technique, was
exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856 where it was described by William Michael Rossetti as 'full of real Pre-

Raphaelitism, that is to say, full of character and naturalism in the detail'

This epic adaptation of Pre-Raphaelite technique was the work of a most remarkable and formidable
woman. Bodichon was a campaigner for women's rights and co-founder of Girton College, Cambridge, as well as

an amateur painter and much-loved friend of artists. D.G. Rossetti described her in 1854 as 'blessed with large
rations of tin [money], fat, enthusiasm and golden hair, who thinks nothing of climbing up a mountain in

breeches, or wading though a stream in none, in the sacred name of pigment'.

60 THE PRE-RAPHAELITE SUCCESSION

As a painter Bodichon preferred wild and uninhabited landscapes. Ruskin tried to direct her towards
architectural subjects, but despaired of her as a pupil when her search for scenery untouched by man took her to the
swamp country of Louisiana which, she wrote, was 'a new revelation of nature's beauty'.
William Bell Scott was an ambitious painter and poet on the fringe of the Pre-Raphaelite group. Although
he had questioned the value of Ruskin's advice to landscape painters in The Elements of Drawing Scott often took
subjects of the kind that Ruskin recommended. In Landscape with a Gate and Watermeadow (Plate 33) he has
looked downwards into the watery foreground of a pond: the brilliant greens of the fringe of reeds and grass and
the reflections of the sky in its surface are illuminated by the dazzling sunlight. The elements of the composition
are crammed into a tight pictorial space; the gate post that is seen in raking light is forced to the left-hand margin
and the tree breaks out of the top edge of the picture space.
George Price Boyce's watercolours, like those of Scott, represent an extreme reaction against a landscape

tradition which accepted the picturesque grouping of familiar or predictable elements for pretty effects. They were
admired and recognized as extraordinary by his contemporaries, including Boyce's friend Rossetti. In Black
Poplars at Pangbourne (Plate 36) Boyce chose a vantage-point which would ensure that the foliage of the trees and
vegetation of the foreground would assume a composition of near abstraction. The subject - the meadows and
woodland beside the Thames - is reduced into dense superimposed layers of green. No view beyond the successive
screens of reed-beds, oak saplings and poplars is permitted. Glimpses only are given of buildings and cattle
amongst the trees, and the parapet of a bridge on the right-hand side of the composition is the only clue to the
course of the river. In the foreground moorhens are pursued by a bounding spaniel.
Boyce delighted to paint scenes which, although unremarkable in themselves, become strange and
fascinating because of his choice of unexpected and often problematic viewpoints and lines of perspective;
timeworn buildings and full-leafed trees are seen in intriguing conjunctions, or masked or partly obscured by
vegetation. These idiosyncratic methods, as well as a colour range of foliate greens and the reds of bricks and tiles,

make Boyce's watercolours distinctive and beautiful.

According to the Art journal in 1860 Birket Foster's 'water-colour drawings must be classed with the Pre-
Raffaellite school . .
.'; indeed, he was a watercolourist who combined progressive and traditional methods. His
classic evocations of the English countryside, such as The Thames from Cliveden (Plate 35), contain vibrant colours

unified and made tonally harmonious by the virtuosity of his stippled bodycolour technique. However, compared
with the works of younger watercolourists like G.P. Boyce and A. W. Hunt, Birket Foster's vision of landscape
seems stilted and done according to preconceived formulae rather than observation. Foster borrowed from the
repertoire of romantic painting the device of framing the composition with trees (seen previously in Samuel
Palmer's Landscape with Windmill, Plate 10), and the precipitous perspective down Thames and the
to the

atmospheric effects of drifting smoke and distant haze are derived from Turner. Admirable though The Thames
from Cliveden is as a watercolour, little sense is given of the artist's own feeling of delight to have found himself in
such an idyllic place.

Ruskin had inculcated a sense of the importance of recording the findings of searching inquiry about the
physical world into the hearts and minds of many younger painters. Amongst those who served a temporary
apprenticeship to the great man was Albert Goodwin. Ruskin took Goodwin to the Alps and Venice in 1872 and the
young artist was encouraged and commissioned to paint the types of architectural and landscape subjects of which
Ruskin approved. Ruskin's fondness for the Italian landscape is perhaps reflected in Goodwin's watercolour
Certosa, near Florence (Plate 37), which shows the monastery bathed in the last rays of the setting sun and the
spacious valley in the blue light of dusk.
More essentially Ruskinian is Goodwin's Old Mill, near Winchester (Plate 34). Here the artist has
32. Barbara Bodichon (1827-1891). Ventnor, Isle of Wight, 1856. Watercolour and bodycolour, 71.1 X 108 cm. (28 x 42 Vz in.)
Private collection
33. William Bell Scott (1811-1890). Landscape with a Gate and Watermeadow, 1865. Watercolour and
bodycolour, 25 X 35.2 cm. (9 7/s x 13% in.) Maidstone Museum and Art Gallery

34. Albert Goodwin, RWS (1845-1932). Old Mill, near Winchester, 1875. Watercolour and bodycolour, with
ink drawing, 22.2 X 31.7 cm. (8% x 12V: in.) Collection of Dr Chris Beetles
35. Myles Birket Foster, RWS (1825-1899). The Thames from Cliveden. Watercolour and bodycolour, with scratching out, 34.3 x 71.1 cm.
(13V2 x 28 in.) London, British Museum

36. George Price Boyce, RWS (1826-1897). Black Poplars at Pangbourne, 1868. Watercolour, 36.8 x 53.3 cm. ( 14 1
/; x 21 in.
Collection of Christopher Newall
64 THE PRE-RAPHAELITE SUCCESSION

patiently documented a view into the shallow depths of a mill-stream and lovingly studied the construction of the
walls and roofs of the various mill buildings. Nothing about the subject has been assumed; every element has been
carefully observed. Goodwin accepted Ruskin's ethos that landscape painters should search for complete truths on
the basis of their view of the physical world, rather than allow their perceptions to become diffused into
generalized or decorative evocations. At this early stage of his career Goodwin held objectivity more highly than
mere gratification of the eye.

Through the middle years of the century the lessons that had been learnt from Pre-Raphaelitism were
applied to different types of landscape painting, and more and more frequently by artists who had no direct

connection with the Brotherhood or with Ruskin. Pre-Raphaelite technique was adapted by various watercolour-
ists who specialized in woodland scenes, which were popular in the exhibitions of the 1860s. Two charming studies
of children at play in woodland settings, 'Rest in the cool and shady Wood' (Plate 40) by Edmund George Warren
and 'Hide and Seek' (Plate 39) by George Shalders, represent this specialization. Warren and Shalders departed
from the technical requirements of Pre-Raphaelitism by using repeated touches of the same opaque colours over
wide areas of their compositions, rather than observing and meticulously matching the different colours in nature
as Ruskin insisted landscape painters should do.
In Academy Notes (1859) Ruskin described two of Warren's watercolours as 'good instances of deceptive
painting - scene-painting on a small scale - the treatment of the light through the leaf interstices being skilfully
correspondent with photographic effects. There is no refined work or feeling in them, but they are careful and
ingenious; and their webs of leafage are pleasant fly-traps to draw public attention.' The same criticism would
apply to 'Rest in and shady wood'.
the cool
Richard Redgrave's Parkhurst Woods, Abinger (Plate 38) is a delightful view of the floor of a beechwood,
where a child sits gazing out at the spectator. The Pre-Raphaelite fondness for the ancient woodlands of Surrey and
Kent, previously expressed in oil by Holman Hunt, is recalled in this simple but inviting watercolour.

Birket Foster's watercolours of figures, usually children, seen in a pleasant if untidy open-air setting, mark
a further stage in the process by which landscape painting became a vehicle for sentimental domestic and genre
subjects. In Lane Scene Hamhleden (Plate 41) the artist has found a mother and children for his models. Birket
at

Foster created in his watercolours of rustic life, of which Lane Scene at Hambleden is a quintessential example, a
vision of the countryside as it never was, but nevertheless one which provided town and country dwellers with an
enduring image of the rural landscape of a mythical past.
When artifice rather than observation determined the composition of watercolours, and the handling and
use of colour derived from a formula rather than a passionate belief in truth to nature, Pre-Raphaelitism became
disingenuous and vulgarized. However, when the landscape painters of the 1850s and 1860s combined detailed
views with the more mysterious sense of the uniqueness of a specific place, they provide a vision of an undisturbed
landscape only accessible or capable of being explored through its record in watercolour.
Watercolour was often used for topographical and architectural subjects. The medium was prized for its

practical qualities by professional and amateur painters who wished to record buildings and architectural detail as

well as views of their rural or urban settings.

Alfred William Hunt's Finchale Priory (Plate 43) and Henry George Hine's Amberley Castle (Plate 42)

both show a timeworn and overgrown relic of architecture in the English countryside seen in the flush of early
summer. Each painter has given a distant and more calmly balanced view of the scenery than Pre-Raphaelite
precedent suggested. Hunt's subject provides a minute account of the woodland around Finchale Priory and
beyond on the bank of the escarpment above the River Wear. Hine has allowed a more spacious view of the
 '

Be f

— -
'

37. Albert Goodwin, RWS (1845-1932). Certosa, near Florence, 1873. Watercolour, 49.5 x 72.4 cm. (19V: X 28V2 in.

Private collection
38. Richard Redgrave, RA (1804-18S8). Parkhurst Wood,, Abinger, 1865. Watercolour and bouvcolour,
25.4 x 38.1 cm. (10 X 15 in.) London, Victoria and Albert Museum

39. George Shalders (1826-1873). 'Hide and Seek'. Watercolour and bodycolour, heightened with gum
arable, 29.8 X 35.3 cm. (11% x 137s in.) Collection of Mr and Mrs Michael Bryan
40. Edmund George Warren, RI (1834-1909). 'Rest in the cool and shady Wood', 1861. Watercolour and
bodycolour, heightened with gum arabic, 77.5 x 120.3 cm. (30V2 X 47 3/s in.) London, Bethnal Green Museui

_
41. Myles Birket Foster, RVVS (1825-1899). Lane Scene at Hambleden, exhibited 1862. Watercolour and bodycoloui
42.5 X 63.5 cm. (I6V4 x 25 in.) London, Tate Gallery
42. Henry George Hine, RI (1811-1895). Amberley Castle, 1867. Watercolour and bodvcolour, with scratching out, 26 x 5/ .2 cm.
(IOV4 X 22 Vi in.) Collection of Christopher Newall
43. Alfred William Hunt, RWS (1830-1896). Finchale Priory, exhibited 1862. Watercolour and bodycolour, with scratching out,
32.4 X 48.3 cm. A
[12 3 X 19 in.) Private collection
70 THE PRE-RAPHAELITE SUCCESSION

buildings of Amberley and the landscape of the Sussex Downs. Both works demonstrate the adaptation of the Pre-
Raphaelite style of landscape painting to topographical purposes.
The Pre-Raphaelite objectives of truthful observation and accurate delineation were thus adopted by
artists to document the ancient architecture of Europe. Many were seized by the fear, justified by
and antiquarians
contemporary and subsequent events, that much of it would be mutilated by restoration or destroyed.
A campaign of architectural record-making was led by Ruskin. As a young man he had admired and learnt
from the architectural drawings of Samuel Prout; his early drawings contain the emphasis on details of

decrepitude which the topographical tradition dictated. However, during the 1850s Ruskin evolved a style of
draughtsmanship in which all pictorial emphasis is directed towards the materials and forms of the buildings, and
no distraction allowed. Ruskin recognized the value of photographs for recording the appearances of buildings;
and his own draughtsmanship was analogous to the process of photography in its relentless search for

information. He described his drawings as 'written notes of certain facts, . . . put down in the rudest and clearest
way, as many as possible.'
Ruskin was obsessed with the architectural history of Venice, which he described in The Stones of Venice
(1851-3). He visited the city nine times between 1841 and 1888, and found inspiration there for some of his most

beautiful drawings, including The South Side of the Basilica of St Mark's, Venice, seen from the Loggia of the
Doge's Palace (Plate 45). This watercolour was made as an illustration for a book of plates entitled Examples of the
Architecture of Venice and reflects both Ruskin's profound knowledge of, and sheer delight in, the ancient
building. The South Side of the Basilica of St Mark's takes the Pre-Raphaelite method of close proximity to the
subject to its logical conclusion. Ruskin has crammed his view of the double tiers of marble columns and Byzantine
capitals into an upright rectangular sheet which he extended twice so that more of the building could be shown. No
view is given of the familiar silhouette of the basilica or of neighbouring buildings; he has concentrated the
composition entirely on the detail and essence of this single structure. All formality has been dispensed with; the
decoration and texture of certain surfaces are rendered with minute exactitude while other areas are left almost
blank. Passionate and committed though this work may be Ruskin's urgent desire to investigate and record caused
him to economize his efforts rather than work up more finished or pictorial compositions.
In 1854 Ruskin wrote to G.P. Boyce recommending that he study the projecting flank of the facade of St

Mark's from the loggia of the Doge's Palace, which was 'one point, as far as I know, never drawn ... if you make
friends with the old porter of the Ducal palace - and get into the upper loggia at the corner St. Marks portico comes
in somehow so - [accompanied by a sketch] with the top of the broken square capital of the St. Jean d'Acre pillar
underneath - & St. Marks place behind most beautifully.'
Boyce's journey to Italy in 1854 was an act of homage to Ruskin; he studied the buildings that Ruskin
considered important and at risk, and in doing so he set a pattern for a succession of architectural watercolourists
whom Ruskin advised, or commissioned, to paint specific buildings. Ruskin was concerned that Boyce might not
'estimate justly the value of Verona' as a source of subjects: 'the little group of the Scala Monuments', he wrote, 'is

altogether unrivalled in the world for sweet colour & light and shade; and in these times there is no knowing how
long it may stand.' Boyce's Tomb of Mastino II one of two drawings that he made of
della Scala (Plate 44) is

Verona and it fulfills the criteria that Ruskin and he agreed upon: 'near subject - good architecture - colour - &
light & shade.'
After the death of his father in 1864 Ruskin gained complete financial independence; this allowed him to

commission artists to record the appearances of threatened buildings throughout Europe. In 1878 he founded the
Guild of St George, which he hoped would be the embryo of a socialistic community in which all would work for
the general good and where emphasis would be placed on the spiritual importance of art. The museum of the Guild
 THE PRE-RAPHAELITE SUCCESSION 71

became a repository for the works of art which Ruskin had accumulated, and a spur for him to add to the collection.
The most important artist to work for Ruskin and the Guild of St George in Venice was John Wharlton
Bunney. Ruskin and Bunney had travelled together to Venice in 1869 and Bunney settled in the city for the
remaining years of his life. Palazzo Manzoni, on the Grain! Canal, Venice (Plate 46) was one of the first

watercolours that he made for Ruskin. In its exact depiction of the decoration of the palace and the colours and
grain of its marble cladding it is a tour de force of architectural watercolour painting. Bunney allowed no
expression in the handling of paint; record making was his only objective. The view of the palace is squeezed into
the overall composition without the indulgence of subsidiary areas or picturesque details. This was a joyless and
painstaking use of the medium (the watercolour was 'retouched and invigorated by J. Ruskin' at some stage), but
Bunney achieved his purpose, which was to convey by means of Pre-Raphaelite realism the architectural form of
the building.
Ruskin bought a number of watercolours for the Guild of St George from the American artist Henry
Roderick Newman, whom he first met in 1879. He considered the close-up studies that Newman made of

individual buildings in Florence as 'quite the most valuable records yet existing of the old city'. In the St George's

museum catalogue they were described as being 'copied with such precision and exactitude as if every block, and
every subject, was to be taken singly as a separate archaeological study'- This might serve as a definition of the
Ruskinian objective in architectural painting.
Newman had assimilated and understood Ruskin's artistic theories as a young man. He said of his early

career: 'My earliest work was careful studies of the old buildings of New York City with their tiled roofs, . . .

Every one of these houses is now gone, but they helped me to understand European architecture. My first

introduction to that was at Chartres. From [tjhere I went to Italy.' Newman's architectural views in Florence,
elsewhere in Tuscany, and Venice, date from 1870 onwards; his View of Florence, from the Gardens of the Palazzo
de' Mozzi (Plate 47) includes the Duomo and Palazzo Vecchio. The composition is framed in the foreground by
olive trees and a fig sapling, and is more conventional than his earlier work in its picturesque view-finding.
Some watercolourists of the 1860s sought to describe the transformation that parts of the landscape of
Britain had undergone during the Industrial Revolution. Wherever the commercial impetus of Victorian England
held sway, railway lines and bridges were constructed; harbours and piers built and rivers embanked; and factories

and warehouses appeared in the landscape.

Henry George Hine painted his Railway Line at Camden Town (Plate 49) at about the same time as Ford
Madox Brown's view of Hampstead (see Plate 29) and at only a few miles distance. Hine, however, introduced an
element unimaginable to earlier generations: the arched railway embankments which provide access to the main
termini of King's Cross, Euston and St Pancras stations. Georgian houses are seen facing the massive brick
structure, which carries a locomotive hauling open carriages into London at roof-top level.

Hunt was encouraged to look

Alfred William for subjects in the industrial landscape of the north-east of

England, where he had friends and patrons. Hunt was fascinated by the weird shapes and improbable perspectives
to be observed in the engineering and construction works which he found in progress. Travelling Cranes, Diving
Bell, & etc., on the Unfinished Part of Tynemouth Pier (Plate 50) shows a view of the ruins of Tynemouth Priory
at the mouth of the River Tyne through a massive structure of wooden beams. He described in a
and the lighthouse
1869 the purpose of the 'wooden staging - on the beams of which are laid tramways - and upon these
letter of

tramways run travelling cranes with stones and diving bells - the stones to be let down each in its place to form the
breakwater, . . . this being a solid mass causes the white cloud of spray where the waves break over it. ' Hunt found
a sublime beauty in a landscape in the process of industrial transformation; his watercolour gives a documentary
account of a feat of engineering and captivates the eye with its abstract vortex of shapes and colour.
44. George Price Boyce, RWS (1826-1897). Tomb of Mastino 11

delta Scala, 1S54.40 x 27 cm. (15V4 x LOVs in.) Collection

of Christopher Newall

45. John Ruskin, HRWS

(1819-1900). The South Side of the
from the Loggia of the
Basilica of St Mark's, Venice, seen
Doge's Palace. Watercolour and pencil, heightened with white
bodycolour, 95.9 x 45.4 cm. [373A x 17 /s in.)
7

Private collection
46. John Wharlton Bunney (1828-1882) (and John Ruskin). Palazzo Manzoni, on the Grand Canal,
Venice, 1871. Watercolour and bodycolour, 69.8 X 83.8 cm. (27 /: x 33 in.) Sheffield, The Ruskin
1

Gallery - Collection of the Guild of St George.

47. Henry Roderick Newman (1843-1917). View of Florence, horn the Gardens of the Palazzo de'

Mozzi, 1877. Watercolour and bodycolour, 24 X 33 cm (9V: x 13 in.) New York,

Hirschl & Adler, Inc.
^dsy&rSSs

48. John Brett, ARA (1830-1902). View at Ureal Yarmouth, 1868. Watercolour, 31.8 x 47 cm. (UVi X 18 1
/: in.) Private collection

49. Henry George Hine, RI (1811-1895). Railway Lme at Lamden Town. Watercolour and body colour, 17 x 24.6 cm.
3
(6 /4 X 9 5/s in.) London, Anthony Reed Gallery
76 THE PRE-RAPHAELITE SUCCESSION

John Brett, another painter in the Pre-Raphaelite circle, used the medium to record the townscapes of the
British Isles. His View at Great Yarmouth (Plate 48) shows a timeless scene of a fishing boat setting sail within the
harbour at Yarmouth. The background consists of a miscellaneous but eminently naturalistic assortment of boats,

a derrick for lifting loads of fish from the holds, and warehouses in which the catches would be sorted and sold, each

complete with a wooden-built watch-tower from which the fleet might be observed.
A close-up view of a fisherman, A Fisherman with his Dinghy at Lulworth Cove (Plate 51), was painted by
William Henry Millais, the brother of John Everett Millais. During the 1850s and 1860s he studied the coasts and
river landscapes of the British Isles, and occasionally represented scenes of working life. W.H. Millais subscribed
to Pre-Raphaelite principles in his conscientious description of geological features. In A Fisherman he has
observed both the pebbles of the beach and the dramatic strata of rock which form the headland at Lulworth.
Pre-Raphaelite principles remained current in British art for several decades. Ruskin had perversely
objected to a watercolour of Snowdon by the Manchester artist Henry Clarence Whaite, when it was exhibited at

the Royal Academy in 1859, as 'suffering under the . . . oppression of plethoric labour'. Whaite exhibited Castle
Rock, Cumberland (Plate 52) in 1877; in this instance the artist has sought a solution to the problem, which all

watercolourists faced eventually, of how to escape the dictates of obsessive realism and the commensurate labour
of meticulous handling. Castle Rock is painted on a large scale and the elements of the landscape, which include the
sheer rock face and the upland distances as well as the foreground meadows, woodland and farmstead, are vibrant
textures of repeated strokes of colour.
John William Inchbold had experienced Ruskin's immediate supervision in the early years of his career as
a landscape painter. He was described by William Michael Rossetti as 'perhaps highest of the strictly Pre-
Raphaelite landscape painters . Much praised by Ruskin'. Inchbold was a rootless and peripatetic individual
. .

who painted landscapes in many different parts of Europe in the course of his lifetime. His fondness for the Alps,
which he first visited in 1856, may have been inspired by Ruskin's own enthusiasm, and he returned to paint in
Switzerland on a number of occasions. His View above Montreux (Plate 53) demonstrates his continuing
adherence to Pre-Raphaelite principles in a general sense; however, the handling of the paint is deceptively loose.
In the foreground, for example, areas of green are applied in broad patches, and in the distant mountainside effects

of atmospheric mistiness are achieved by thin washes of colour. While an appearance of detail is given, the overall
impact was more important to the artist. In 1874 the following account appeared:

Mr. Inchbold interprets his subjects with great taste and feeling, idealizing always to some extent, so that his
drawings tend rather to a spiritual and not quite substantial conception of things, than to a material solidity;

but in times of a vulgar yet powerful realism, this refinement is like poetry after prose. (Quoted from
Portfolio by A. Staley: The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, 1973)

Inchbold's watercolour represents a meeting-point between the technical virtuosity of Pre-Raphaelitism and the
pictorial restraint and sensitivity of the Aesthetic Movement.
For some watercolourists minute detail and realism of colour became habitual ends. Anna Alma-Tadema,
the daughter of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, was born after the main force of Pre-Raphaelitism was spent. She gave
an extraordinary demonstration of photographic realism and brilliant colour in her Eton College Chapel (Plate 54).
Painted in 1885, it would be hard to say whether this was the product of an ongoing tradition of Pre-Raphaelite
architectural view-painting, or the revival of interest in minute observation which occurred in the closing years of

the century. Kate Greenaway was encouraged by Ruskin to study nature in the form of sections of turf and
lichenous rock. The specimens were taken from Ruskin's garden at Brantwood in the Lake District and sent to her
in her studio in Hampstead, 'Not to tease you - but they'll go on growing and being pleasant companions.'
50. Alfred William Hunt, RVVS (1830-1896). Travelling Cranes, Diving Bell. & etc., on the Unfinished Part of Tynemout
exhibited 1867. Watercolour, with scratching out, 32.4 x 27 cm. (12 3/t X 10 5/s in.) Collection of Christopher Newall
51. William Henry Millais (1828-1899). A Fisherman with his Dinghy at Lulworth Cove. Watercolour and hodycolour, heightened
with gum arable, 16.2 X 26.3 cm. (6 3/s X lOVs in.) Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum
52. Henry Clarence Whaite, RWS (1828-1912). Castle Rock, Cumberland, 1877. Watercolour, 76.2 x 133.3 cm. (30 X 52 1
/? in.

Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery

 i

3
53.John William Inchbold (1830-1888). View above Montreux, 1880. Watercolour, 30.8 x 50.3 cm. {UVe x 19 /4 in.

London, Victoria and Albert Museum

54. Anna Alma-Tadema (before 1869-1943). Eton College Chapel, 1885. Watercolour and bodycolour,
52 X 36 cm. (20 /: X 14'/s in.) Private collection
1
82 THE PRE-RAPHAELITE SUCCESSION

Greenaway's Study of Rock, Moss and Ivy (Plate 55) was made in response to Ruskin's gifts and presented to him
as an example of dutiful observation. It represents possibly the very last of many watercolours specifically done to

satisfy Ruskin's theoretical view of landscape and nature painting.

The Pre-Raphaelite perception of landscape and architecture resulted from a desire to penetrate and
understand the inner significance of a place or a building, and to describe with selfless and dispassionate objectivity
its features and characteristics. Pre-Raphaelite watercolourists drew ever closer to their subjects in the search for

both information and abstraction; on the one hand they hoped to explain the contents of the subject and on the
other to make pictorial form from the shapes and textures of which the physical world consists.

55. Kate Greenaway, RWS, RI (1846-1901). Study of Rock. Mo^ and Ivy, 1885. Watercolour and bodycolour, 18.7 x 33 cm.
(7Vh X 13 in.) Sheffield, The Ruskin Gallery - Collection of the Guild of St George
6THE IDYLLISTS AND OTHER ILLUSTRATORS

commissioned to make illustrations.

T hroughout the nineteenth century painters had been
Turner made preparatory drawings for etchings

amongst the Pre-Raphaelites Millais and Frederick Sandys produced important illustrative work. As has been said
and lithographs, and

earlier, the livelihood and prosperity of many artists depended on the trade. However, it was only during the later

1860s and 1870s, when in fact there was a downturn in business amongst the publishers of printed illustrations,

that illustrators turned in large numbers to the medium of watercolour, and had a stylistic impact on how the
medium was used.
The formative experience of designing illustrative plates for books or magazines had a direct bearing on the
aesthetic preconceptions of a younger generation of artists. The images that they drew, and which were
transferred into black and white wood-block engravings, were composed in direct and legible forms which
generally filled the overall picture space. To some extent these considerations influenced the watercolour subjects
of the illustrators, which in any case were often worked-up versions of subjects originally treated as black and

white illustrations. A painted view was no longer supposed to correspond minutely to the subject under scrutiny,
and realism was not accepted as an absolute standard.
Various informal groups of watercolourists who had previously worked, or continued to work, as
illustrators, were formed. The most conspicuous of these centred around the personality of Frederick Walker
during the second half of the 1860s, and was later known as the Idyllists. The names of John William North and
George John Pinwell are associated with the group. The term 'Idyllists', however, was only attached to them in the

1890s.
The Idyllists painted figurative subjects in domestic or landscape settings. Walker and North favoured the
thematic treatment of scenes from contemporary life. Pinwell retained the practice of giving imaginative form to
historical or literary texts. None of the Idyllists painted pure landscapes; North's landscapes without figures, such

as The Old Pear Tree (see Plate 90), derive from his later years after Walker and Pinwell had died. They all

occasionally painted in oil, but their most intimate and characterful works were watercolours, and these represent
the last great achievement of the Victorian tradition of bodycolour technique.
The Idyllists were concerned with the union of figures with their immediate surroundings, rather than
with the material analysis of the physical world attempted by the Pre-Raphaelites. The view that was offered of
landscape remained restricted; human activities were observed within a confined foreground and at close range.
Walker's Spring (Plate 56) shows a young girl, intent on her purpose of picking primroses, pushing aside the whip-
like willow stems which conceal clusters of flowers. One senses in the watercolour the first glimmer of warmth of

an English spring, and notices that the model is carrying rather than wearing her coat. The points of green about to
burst on the branches, and the fresh grass on the ground of the coppice, identify precisely the time of year.
84 THE IDYLL1STS AND OTHER ILLUSTRATORS

In An Amateur (Plate 57) Walker has shown a coachman opening a clasp-knife with the intention of
cutting a cabbage. Circumstantial evidence of the outside world is provided by the lodge and gates (behind which a

vehicle is parked) of a country house, in which one presumes the man's employer lives. However, the essential
object of the watercolour was to observe secretly a private moment in the life of a working man. The pride that he
takes in the vegetables that he has grown, and his hesitation in deciding which cabbage to pick, are subtly evoked.
Walker has viewed the scene with sensitivity and discretion; he has allowed a view into a confined place without
disrupting the preoccupation of his unconscious model.
Both Spring and An Amateur depend for their naturalism on Walker's ability to convey colour and depth
of tone in what Ruskin called his 'semi-miniature, quarter fresco, quarter wash manner'. His use of bodycolour
was criticized by a reviewer in the Art journal of 1869, who wrote:

It will be worth anyone's while to observe the artist's mode of manipulation, - the pigments are laid on thick,
as in the impasto of tempera; the method has more singularity than merit; the painter is wholly defiant of
opacity; when he paints a wall, he lays on mortar as liberally as a mason, and thus the wall is a wall

accordingly; it stands firm, has solid substance, and throws off light, just as any other masonry.

Walker drew a caricature of himself squeezing paint out of a vast tube of Chinese White and asked: 'What would
"The Society" say if it could only see me?' J. W. North's account of Walker's technique explains how he and the
other Idyllists gained such an immediate feeling of the landscape:

Walker painted direct from nature, not from sketches. His ideal appeared to be to have suggestiveness in his
work; not by leaving out, but by painting in, detail, and then partly erasing it. This was especially noticeable
in his water colour landscape work, which frequently passed through a stage of extreme elaboration of
drawing, to be afterwards carefully worn away, so that a suggestiveness and softness resulted - not
emptiness, but veiled detail. His knowledge of nature was sufficient to disgust him with the ordinary
conventions which do duty for grass, leaves, and boughs; and there is scarcely an inch of his work that has not
been at one time a careful, loving study of fact. (J.G. Marks: Life and Letters of Frederick Walker, 1896)

'Composition is the art of preserving the accidental look', wrote Walker, thus acknowledging his impulse to
transcend Pre-Raphaelite observation. The creative process which he undertook derived first from a minute
inspection of the physical world, but also depended on the selection and arrangement of elements into harmonious
and significant pictorial forms.

Walker revered William Henry Hunt and owed his own bodycolour technique to a study of Hunt's still-

lifes and interiors; in turn Walker was acclaimed by contemporary and younger artists. He invented a type of
rustic subject which was imitated by later watercolourists until the turn of the twentieth century.
Although Walker and his friend North were both born and brought up in London, they made long stays in

the countryside to seek out rural subjects. North rented an ancient manor house in Somerset, called Halsway
Court and this beautiful building and the surrounding fields and villages appear in many of the Idyllists'
watercolours of the later 1860s. Walker was a frequent visitor from 1868; on one occasion he wrote: T came here,
as I thought, on a "flying visit," but the place is so completely lovely, and there's so much paintable material, that I

expect to remain until quite the end of the month.'

In Halsway Court (Plate 58) North has shown the stone-built house and the garden glowing with colours
made brilliant by the effects of evening light. In the foreground is a bowling green where a child sits while a young
couple talk and gaze at one another across the garden wall. The dense and asymmetrical composition is
characteristic of an artist whose formative training was as an illustrator. (Both North and Walker had worked for
56. FrederickWalker, ARA, RWS (1840-1875). Spring, 1864. Watercolour and bodycolour, 62.2 x 50.2 cm. |24> : x 19 3/4 in.

London, Victoria and Albert Museum

57. FrederickWalker, ARA, RWS (1840-1875). An Amateur (otherwise known as Coachman and Cabbages), exhibited 1870-1.
Watercolour and bodycolour, 17.7 x 25.3 cm. (7 x 10 in.) London, British Museum
58.John William North, ARA, RW5 (1842-1924). Ualsway Court (possibly also known as The Old Bowling Green], 1865.
Watercolour and bodycolour, 33 x 44.5 cm. (13 X \7Vi in.) Collection of Robin de Beaumont
 '

THE IDYLLISTS AND OTHER ILLUSTRATORS

the Dalziel Brothers in London. ) The view of Halsway Court illustrated here represents an extreme elaboration of
naturalistic bodycolour painting and was probably the same painting that North exhibited in 1867 at the Dudley
Gallery under the title The Old Bowling Green. On that occasion the Art Journal 'observed that opaque is here
used in unmitigated manner'; indeed the range and depth of colour, and realism of detail, depended upon the use of
bodycolour. Walker wrote of his friend as they worked together in Somerset: 'North here is doing capital work
(water colour), he is most sincere over it, each inch wrought with gem-like care.'
George John Pinwell's technical proficiency as a watercolourist owed something to both Walker, with
whom he was a contemporary at Leigh's School, and North. In In a Garden at Cookham (Plate 59) Pinwell

demonstrated what his biographer George C. Williamson described as 'his love of tiny brilliant touches of crude
vivid colour, which he used with such dexterity and which gave jewel-like effect to the surface of the picture, and lit

it up in a marvellous way.' The structure of the composition is based on a careful distribution of horizontal and
vertical elements, the dense pattern of which extends throughout the pictorial space and provides a matrix into
which the figures have been positioned. This quality, seen previously in North's Halsway Court, derived from the
illustrator's instinct to extend structural patterns over the entire surface of a composition.
Pinwell was admired for his romantic imagination and for the strange and beautiful renditions of historical
and literary subjects that he painted.

If ever there was a dreamer of dreams 'born out of his due time,' it was George Pinwell, and his art is one of
the most peculiar which has marked modern days. This is indeed a very strange, half-real, half-poetical world
with which he is concerned, and many of his compositions are analogous, in the impression they give to the

spectator, to one of those old North-country ballads which commencing quietly with a maiden seated at her
spinning-wheel, or a page riding across the heather, end in shame and death. (Harry Quilter: A Catalogue of
Pictures and Sketches by George Mason and George Pinwell, Birmingham, 1895)

Pinwell's epic watercolour Gilbert a Becket's Troth (Plate 60) takes for its subject the history of the Saracen maiden
who fell in love with the captive crusader Gilbert a Becket. After she had helped him escape from the Holy Land,
the forlorn yet determined maid followed him to England, where she met with hostility and indifference from the
native population. When the picture was exhibited at the Old Water-Colour Society in 1872 the Art Journal was
full of praise for it and concluded: 'It is a work of great self-possession to entertain such a subject, but it is a triumph
to carry such a theme to an issue so felicitous.'

Amongst Victorian painters Pinwell may be compared with Leighton in his orchestration of the range of
psychological reactions within a large-scale figurative composition. Gilbert a Becket's Troth is a gothic
presentiment of Leighton's Captive Andromache in its representation of an isolated and alien central figure
surrounded by peripheral strangers.
Walker and Pinwell were not close friends, but their works were often compared. Quilter wrote that
Pinwell was:

As pre-Raphaelite in execution as Walker himself, and indeed almost more so, he is also what Walker never
was, pre-Raphaelite in feeling, and has the faint, half-sick straining after beauty which marks the school.
Pinwell was always thinking about beauty, and Walker was always getting it - therein lies much of the
difference.

George Williamson noted that 'Walker did not express any great They did not
satisfaction with Pinwell's pictures.

appeal to him in their hidden poetry, as he preferred a motive more clear and apparent, and colour more refined.

In Fred Walker's great watercolour A Fishmonger's Shop (Plate 61) a young woman, who wears a dress of
59. George John Pinwell, RVVS 11842-1875). In a Garden at Cookham. Watercolour and bodycolour,
19 x 14.3 cm. 1
(7 /; X 5% in.) Collection of Mr and Mrs Michael Brvan
60. George John Pinwell, RWS (1842-1875). Gilbert a Becket's Troth (otherwise known as The Saracen Maid), 1872.
Watercolour and bodycolour, 55.9 X 109.2 cm. (22 x 43 in.) Port Sunlight, Lady Lever Art Gallery
61. Frederick Walker, ARA, RWS 11840-1875). A Fishmonger's Shop, exhibited 1872-3. Watercolour and bodycolour, 35.6 x 57.2 cm.
(14 x 22 1
: in.) Port Sunlight, Lady Lever Art Gallery
 '

92 THE IDYLLISTS AND OTHER ILLUSTRATORS

Regency period, deliberates over the display of fish outside a shop. As in An Amateur the essence of the action
portrayed is momentary and easily understood; the subtlety and elegance of the subject lie in the description of a
moment of uncertainty on the part of the woman. The abstract beauty of the watercolour is in the complex
organization of elaborate detail and contrasting colours within, and completely filling, the rectangular format and
narrow depth of field.

In October 1872 Walker had written to North: 'I'm working hard at a fishmonger's shop, with a great slab
of fish, and a fair buyer !' A description has survived of Walker drawing his sister Mary as she posed outside various
fish shops in the London streets; the artist's vantage-point was a four-wheeled carriage parked alongside.
A Fishmonger's Shop was rapturously received at the Old Water-Colour ^Society Winter Exhibition of
1872-3. The Athenaeum reviewer described the 'showboard . . . loaded with superbly painted fish of all kinds, of
all degrees of lustre and colour, an aggregate of gems, . . . This is a little masterpiece of colour, both local and
general.' The Art journal's obituarist in 1875 recalled the watercolour as 'a small drawing, but of exquisite
manipulation, and absolutely glittering with beautiful tints . . . Mr. Ruskin objects to this drawing, but only
because the labour spent on it "would have painted twenty instructive studies of fish of their real size." '
In

painting A Fishmonger's Shop Walker did not seek, as Ruskin pretended to think he should, to catalogue the

different types of fish, but rather to describe an incident of everyday life in which the relationship between the
figures and their surroundings might be clearly understood. T have put into it all that I know,' he said. Burne-
Jones expressed the opinion: T think for an absolute representation of what a scene in a story would be like F.

Walker's drawings are perfection. Taking the event that he has got to illustrate as his object, he renders it exactly.
The Idyllists represented a physical world which intrigues the spectator by its familiarity but which
remains inaccessible. Knowledge of the materials of which that world consisted was no longer displayed for its own
sake, and consequently realism was transformed into a shifting mirage where the appearance of things was
suggested rather than stated. The watercolours of the Idyllists, whether narrative or thematic in their story-telling
purpose, depend on the artists' empathy for their figures, who are caught unawares either in the course of their

daily lives, or as the protagonists of historical or literary dramas.

If the Idyllists represented a real world adapted to the artists' imaginative purposes there were amongst
their contemporaries in the 1860s and 1870s painters who created deceptively realistic images of total fantasy.
Charles Dickens had written in 1853: 'In a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that
Fairy Tales should be respected.' He was taken at his word by those who painted scenes of fairy life. An age of
materialism, and one which utilized the skills of painters to record the types and differences of all constituents of
the physical world, extended this respect to subjects which existed only in fanciful imaginations.
Dicky Doyle's Under the Dock Leaves- An Autumnal Evening's Dream (Plate 62) goes beyond whimsy in

its account of a fairy festival. A throng of tiny figures is seen arising like a whorl of evening mist from a woodland
stream, and congregates to dance beneath the spreading leaves of the forest floor.
Dicky's brother Charles Altamont Doyle described the spirits that he painted in the night sky above St
Edinburgh as 'personified memories recalled by the Bells as they ring a merry Midnight'. His
Giles' Cathedral in

phantasmagoric watercolour Saint Giles - His Bells (Plate 64) shows a stream of ghosts haunting the city, and
includes heroes and villains, celebrities and members of the mob: Montrose is being driven to his execution; Prince

Charles is escorted by the Clans; George IV enters the city in a carriage. With these figures are representatives of

the Auld Town Guard, Fishwives of the city, and the 4th Light Infantry, seen departing for the Crimean War in

1854. Few watercolours reveal with such surreal clarity the painter's disturbed or joyful visions of the spirit world.
Eleanor Vere Boyle painted a series of small and minutely detailed watercolours from which engraved
illustrations were made for Sarah Austin's The Story without an End. The strange and beautiful painting which
 ,

62. Richard Doyle (1824-1883).

Under the Dock Leaves - An
Autumnal Evening's Dream, 1878.
Watercolour and bodycolour,
50 x 77.5 cm. (19 5/8 X 30 /; 1
in.)
London, British Museum

63. The Hon. Eleanor Vere Boyle

(1825-1916). 'And a neglected
Looking-Glass/And the Child cared
nothing about the Looking-Glass'
c.1868. Watercolour and
bodycolour, heightened with gum
arable, 15.2 x 11.4 cm.
(6x4': in. | Private collection
94 THE IDYLLISTS AND OTHER ILLUSTRATORS

illustrates the lines 'And a neglected Looking-Glass/ And the Child cared nothing about the Looking-Glass' (Plate
63) offers a view of a broken glass amongst a curious assortment of dead leaves, clambering ivy and a peacock
feather. Various microscopically observed insects crawl over the surface of the glass and the wings of a moth are
seen camouflaged amongst the leaves. The reflection of a mouse is seen in the glass. Realism is taken to such a
degree of intensity in this watercolour that it arrives at a level of a fantasy.
The minuteness and accuracy of mid-Victorian watercolour painting was ideally suited in its hallucinatory
realism to the cult of fantasy subjects. At a time when painters became convinced that anything of material
existence might be painted a converse belief grew up that anything that an artist could invent and depict might in
fact exist.

Amongst the wider circle of watercolourists whose early careers had been spent as illustrators, or who
continued occasionally to design for engravers, was Charles Green. The meticulous handling and technical skill

shown in his watercolour 'Something Wrong Somewhere' (Plate 65) allows one to inspect the furnishings and
paraphernalia of the back-room of a Victorian grocer's shop, where the proprietor and his wife puzzle over a

ledger.

Helen Allingham worked as an illustrator for the Graphic and Cornhill magazines until her marriage in

1874 gave her sufficient financial independence to concentrate on watercolour painting. Young Customers (Plate

66) was worked up from a black and white illustration she had made for a book called A Flat Iron for a Farthing; she

exhibited the watercolour at the Old Water-Colour Society in 1875, the year of her election to that association.
Watercolourists of the 1870s delighted in painting everyday scenes from contemporary life. In Greeting
the Postman (Plate 67) Robert Walker Macbeth took a subject previously treated by Walker. Macbeth's version of
the theme shows a family gathered at the door of a country house as the mother receives an eagerly awaited letter

from a mounted postman. Hubert von Herkomer was another artist who was influenced by Walker towards
subjects which describe the life of working-class people in country surroundings. Later he became friends with
North, and learnt from him a rich and colourful bodycolour technique. Herkomer's watercolour The Naughty Boy
(Plate 68), in which a disconsolate child is roughly held by his mother outside a cottage overgrown with roses and
creeper, owes both its subject and technique to the Idyllists.
As the nineteenth century entered its last quarter an interest in the history and traditions of rural life grew
up, and watercolourists sought to describe the appearance of the unspoilt countryside.
Edward Henry Fahey was not strictly an illustrator, but he composed his watercolours with the directness
and fondness for abstract patterns which are associated with the Idyllists and their friends. His Old Farm House
(Plate 70) is an essay in the textures of crumbling plaster. The expanse of wall is interrupted by stone-mullioned
and wooden-framed windows, the irregular glazing of which reflects the light of the setting sun. The house is set

four-square and at a range to allow only a part of its outline and a margin of roof to be seen. Its structural mass is

conveyed by the shadowy view into the open door and the bright light which is seen from the far side of the house.
Helen Allingham was influenced by Walker and Birket Foster in her most characteristic subject, the
vernacular architecture and country life of the southern counties; however, she surpassed both of them in the

sympathy with which she described people and places. Allingham was deeply concerned for the condition of the

rural population at a time when the consequences of agricultural depression were still being felt and when a

traditional way of life was being disrupted by exodus from the land.

Her watercolour South Country Cottage (Plate 69) shows a country habitation unaffected by the
despoliation of the countryside. The catalogue of Allmgham's first exhibition in 1886 gave an account of how such
cottages were being abandoned or demolished as unfit for modern living. Others were ruined, at least from an
artistic point of view, by the improvements and rebuildings undertaken by commuters and week-enders.
64. Charles Altamont Doyle (1832-1893). Saint Giles - His. Bells. Watercolour and ink drawing,
95.6 X 63.5 cm. (37% x 25 in.) Edinburgh, St Giles' Cathedral
65. Charles Green, RI (1840-1898). 'Something Wrong Somewhere', 1868. Watercolour and bodycolour, 49.5 x 36.8
(19V2 x 14'/; in.) London, Victoria and Albert Museum
66. Helen Allmgham, RWS (1848-1926). Young Customers, exhibited 1875. Watercolour, 20.6 x 15.6 cm.
(8Vk X 6Vk in.) London, The Leger Galleries
67. Robert Walker Macbeth, RA, RWS (1848-1910). Greeting the Postman. Watercolour and bodycolour, 14.6 x 20.7 cm. 3
(5 /4 X 8Vs in.
London, Victoria and Albert Museum
68. SirHubert von Herkomer, RA, RWS (1849-1914). The Naughty Boy, Watercolour and bodycolour, 17 x 24.6 cm'. 3
(6 /4 X 9% in.

Watford Borough Council Museum

 '
" i It'im

69. Helen Allingham, RWS (1848-1926). South Country Cottage. Watercolour, 31.7 x 37 cm. |12'/; x 14"s in.) Private collection
70. Edward Henry Fahey, RI (1844-1907). Old Farm House, 18/2. Watercolour and body-colour, heightened with gum arabic,
34.9 X 24.8 cm. (13 3/4 X 9 3A in.) London, Anthony Reed Gallery
102 THE IDYLLISTS AND OTHER ILLUSTRATORS

From 1881 Helen Allingham lived in Surrey close to her most favoured painting haunts, and near her
friend and mentor Birket Foster. Later she moved back to London and became, in a sense, a commuter in reverse.

She and Kate Greenavvay had houses in Hampstead and made painting expeditions into the Middlesex countryside
together. Allingham has left a description of these trips:

During the summer . . . we continued our outdoor work together, generally taking an early train from
Finchley Road to Pinner, for the day. She [Greenaway] was always scrupulously thoughtful for the
convenience and feelings of the owners of the farm or cottage we wished to paint, with the consequence that
we were made welcome to sit in the garden or orchard where other* were refused admittance. (M.H.
Spielmann and G.S. Layard: Kate Greenaway, 1905)

Helen Allingham, following the example of the Idyllists, sought the informal and intimate character of a scene

where the relationship between figures and their familiar surroundings might be observed. The accuracy with
which she studied landscape and architecture allows her watercolours to stand as an historical record of the lost

appearance and way of life of the English countryside.

Many watercolounsts of the generation after the Pre-Raphaelites continued to record their surroundings
and to paint watercolours which were small in scale and specific in observation. But their approach was more
subjective. They were more deliberate in their selection, and sufficiently detached from the subject itself to delight

in the abstract and asymmetrical shapes which might be seen in the physical world. In this sense they were
advancing unconsciously towards a more modern aesthetic where the patterns and conjunctions of form were to

become the principal concern of artists.

7THE AESTHETIC MOVEMENT

cultural detachment entered the more progressive

I .n the 1870s a mood of introspection
circles of British art. Painters retreated
and
from a
a feeling of

view of the
physical world into a realm where they could explore their own fantasies and imaginations. Realism was no longer
seen as the only means of relaying factual information about the material world, or as an aid to the story-telling
function of a picture. If the imagery of watercolour painting remained literal it stemmed from the artist's power of
invention rather than his capacity for observation; watercolourists sought to describe scenes which might strike
chords of recognition in the spectator's subconscious mind, and to create images which were symbolical rather
than narrative.
The Aesthetic Movement, like Pre-Raphaelitism before it, represented a rapid advance in ideas about the
purpose and importance of art, and embraced all kinds of creative work. For the first time it was believed that the
practice of art was an end in itself and that works of art should only be judged or justified according to the criterion
of whether they were beautiful or not. Art was seen as spiritually uplifting and having the power of gratifying the
eye, but its moral significance was not acknowledged. The age gave rise to the immortal slogan 'art for art's sake',
and a generation of watercolourists adhered to the principle which the phrase encapsulates. However, just as the
influence of the Pre-Raphaelites, adapted and sometimes misinterpreted, had gradually filtered into the works of a

wider circle of watercolourists, so the principles of the Aesthetic Movement were only slowly understood by the
community at large.

The roots of the Movement lay in the second and romantic phase of Pre-Raphaelitism. Burne-Jones's
watercolours such as Green Summer (Plate 23) were amongst the very first in English imaginative art where the
artist and spectator were not bound to a strict interpretation or narrative account of a pre-determined story.
Conservative opinion, as has been seen, regarded this as a sinister direction. In 1869 the Art Journal had stated:
'This art has assuredly not the breath of life, the health of nature, or the simplicity of truth : it belongs to the realm
of dreams, myths, nightmares, and other phantasms of diseased imagination.'
The following year, when discussing Burne-jones's Phyllis and Denwphoon (Plate 24) the Art Journal
reviewer concluded that: 'Mr. Burne Jones in the Old Water- Col our Society stands alone: he has in this room no
followers; in order to judge how degenerate this style may become in the hands of disciples, it is needful to take a
walk to the Dudley Gallery.'
Even before Burne-Jones's resignation from the Old Water-Colour Society in 1870 the Dudley Gallery
had provided exhibition space for aesthetically advanced watercolourists. Robert Bateman was the unofficial leader
of a clique of Dudley artists who painted mythological subjects usually set in generalized arboreal landscapes. His
watercolour The Dead Knight (Plate 71) is a curious product of Victorian medievalism. The body of a knight, partly
covered by a shield decorated with armorial bearings, is seen lying beside a pool fed by a spring. A faithful hound
 •' 3C V
Jfe * '

*-' '

* -. .-

'

<
'

SSjjIjk '
St-^jfe"^*!

^^ v'^ar;^ A ..

: •

""'
"
M _ *"•-

*•"*--
i»
** .
-

^
1'
'"'""-.;*
^ S i, .:-. "

.
:
...
"* * -

'"

71. Robert Bateman (b. c. 1841— fl. 1889). The Dead Knight. Watercolour, 28 x 38.7 cm. (11 x 15V4 in.) Collection of Robin de Beaumont

»**-
72. Walter Crane, RVV5 11845-1915). Diana, 1881. Watercolour and bodycolour, 35.2 x 24.8 cm. ( 13 s/s x 9 3A in.

Collection of Richard Dorment

106 THE AESTHETIC MOVEMENT

sits beside its dead master in a woodland glade strewn with cow parsley. The spectator becomes the witness of the
tragic and pathetic consequences of some chivalric mission or rivalry the circumstances of which are not revealed.
Walter Crane remembered how Burne-Jones's watercolours of the 1860s excited the circle of artists who
exhibited at the Dudley:

The curtain had been lifted, and we had had a glimpse into a magic world of romance and pictured poetry,
peopled with ghosts of 'ladies dead and lovely knights,' - a twilight world of dark mysterious woodlands,
haunted streams, meads of deep green starred with burning flowers, veiled in a dim and mystic light, and
stained with low-toned crimson and gold, . . . (An Artist's Reminiscences, 1907)

Crane's later watercolours of slightly menacing wooded landscapes and vague but sinister mythical events
represent a world which the artist has dreamt of rather than visited. In his Diana (Plate 72) the huntress seems to
be leading her male followers through a primeval forest, perhaps to their destruction.
A third watercolourist in the Dudley circle was Alfred Sacheverell Coke, whose mythological subjects such
as Eros and Ganymede (Plate 73) combine a delicate neo-classicism in their figurative and architectural elements
with wooded landscape settings, perhaps inspired by the paintings of Uccello or Giorgione. Such watercolours
explored the sexual connotations of classical literature and fable.
The watercolourists of the first stage of the Aesthetic Movement were seen as artistic dissidents and were
generally ignored rather than condemned within the contemporary art world. However, in 1877 the opening of
the Grosvenor Gallery made clear to the public at large that an artistic schism had taken place. On the one hand
were the painters who were prepared to undertake profound and disturbing subjects and to confront stylistic and
aesthetic issues, and on the other those who generally preferred bland and sentimental subjects which soothed
rather than challenged the spectator's emotions.
Evelyn De Morgan exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery from the year of its inception. Her mythological
subjects maintained and adapted the tradition which Burne-Jones had re-invigorated. She took the subject of
Deianira (Plate 74) from Greek myth, and expressed for those familiar with the fable the despair of a woman who
realizes that she has been made the instrument of her husband's death, and for whom remorseful desolation was a
prelude to suicide. The landscape of Deianira is a distillation of the impressions that the countryside of Italy had
made on the artist's imagination; the draperies and gestures of the figure, which dominates the composition on an
heroic scale, derive from her study of Michelangelo and the Italian Mannerists.
What had been at first a classicizing tendency in British art, discernible in the balance and passivity of
various of Burne-Jones's watercolours of the 1860s, became during the later stages of the Aesthetic Movement a

mood of unrestrained neo-classicism. In the paintings of Albert Moore all references to contemporary life were
excluded in the interest of an imagery which had only the most abstract associations. Draperies and ornaments
loosely evoke a classical past, but in a generalized fashion, and they are without historical foundation.
The title of Albert Moore's watercolour Myrtle (Plate 75) is taken from the spray of leaves and berries in a
vase on the floor, but is otherwise without significance. Moore has represented a nude girl, seated with her legs
concealed by flowing draperies, and with her arms raised and hands clasped behind her head. She is serenely
indifferent to the artist's attentions and gives no indication of her feelings. Myrtle is a product of Moore's
relentless search for beauty in the arrangment of shapes and colours, and of his exploration of the means of

enlivening the folds of drapery by observing how they fall around the girl's body. The psychological calm and
compositional equilibrium, and the absence of any moral or historical significance, make this a watercolour of
sincere classicism and a fulfilment of the artistic ideals of the Aesthetic Movement.
In about 1871 Ruskin had written in a letter to Burne-Jones: 'Nothing puzzles me more than the delight
73. Alfred Sacheverell Coke (fl. 1869-1893). Eros and Ganymede. Watercolour, 20.3 x 26.7 cm. (8 X 10V: in.
London, Victoria and Albert Museum
mmmEmmmm^mamamm
74. Evelyn De Morgan (1855-1919). Deianira, c. 1878. Watercolour and bodycolour, 45.7 x 30.5 cm.
(18 x 12 in.) Private collection
 I H

75. Albert Joseph Moore, ARWS (1841-1893). Myrtle, exhibited 1886. Watercolour,
28.8 X 16.5 cm. (IIV-j x 6 1
/: in.) Cambridge, Mass., The Fogg Art Museum
110 THE AESTHETIC MOVEMENT

that painters have in drawing mere folds of drapery and their carelessness about the folds of water and clouds, or
hills, or branches. Why should the tuckings in and out of muslin be eternally interesting?' During the Aesthetic
Movement the study of draperies, and of draped and nude figures, preoccupied many watercolourists. It is clear,

moreover, that draperies and figures were more than a concomitant of neo-classicism; they were components of
subjects which were metaphors for repressed or passive sexual desire. For this reason mythological and classical

subjects were favoured by a circle of artists and patrons who believed that art should address themes of implicit
sexuality.
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, in his watercolour Pandora (Plate 76), departed from the reconstructions of
Roman life for which he was famous, and created a simple and timeless portrait of a red-haired girl wearing a crown

of bluebells and gazing at her curious casket, which is decorated with a sculpted sphinx. The watercolour expresses
Pandora's hopes and fears of what she may reveal by opening the box, and is thus symbolic of a mood of
anticipation.
Romantic medievalism remained a source of inspiration to painters throughout the Aesthetic Movement
and up until the end of the century. Watercolourists based their subjects on literary or poetic texts, as Rossetti had
done, or invented more generalized themes which evoked an image of the Middle Ages and supported the
Victorians' view of themselves as the protagonists of a new age of chivalry. Watercolours of this type were only
finally recognized as anachronistic when modernity was thrust upon painters by the First World War.

Byam Shaw exhibited his gigantic watercolour The Queen of Spades (Plate 77) at the Royal Academy in
1898. A.L. Baldry may have had the work in mind when, late in the same year, he wrote of the artist:

As a colourist he is amazingly vigorous, rejoicing in brilliant combinations and gorgeous arrangements; in

his composition he affects a wealth of detail which calls for the most judicious handling and exact
consideration; and in choosing his subjects he inclines towards motives that are imbued with the spirit of

mediaeval romanticism. ('Our Rising Artists: Mr. Byam Shaw', in the Magazine of Art, 1898)

The watercolour derived both from the artist's interest in the long tradition of iconic representations of the
enthroned Madonna, and from the ritualized subjects and curious perspectives and symmetries of Rossetti's
elaborate watercolours of the 1860s. As a means of artistic escapism it depended, as Baldry wrote, on the
'extraordinary fertility of his imagination to the power, of which he has consistently proved himself possessed, of
embodying in his pictures a great variety of fanciful suggestion, and a succession of ideas fascinating to the people
who affect that type of art which has a story to tell.'

Byam Shaw was the leader of a London-based group of watercolourists sometimes referred to as the 'label
school' (so-called because of their frequent habit of signing their works within a trompe I'oeil cartouche). Eleanor
Fortescue-Brickdalecame under his influence and was the member of the group who most deliberately revived
Pre-Raphaelite methods of observation and brightness of colour. In the Spring Time (Plate 78) is a meticulous and
yet highly romantic watercolour in which a young girl wearing a flowing dress of silk or satin sits amongst
bluebells.
Watercolourists associated with the Aesthetic Movement believed that the medium's potential for realism
should be utilized to reveal the splendours of the imagination rather than mundane events from people's daily
lives. They did, however, work as portraitists and in that genre provided a psychological insight into their own age.
Watercolour was recognized in the 1870s as a medium which allowed a more intimate and personal approach to a
sitter than oil, and which lent itself to the subtle and affectionate characterization of personality. The traditions of

oil and watercolour portrait painting diverged during the nineteenth century; in professional terms there were few
specialist portrait watercolourists, but many artists occasionally drew portraits in watercolour, either as the result
76. Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, OM, RA, RWS (1836-1912). Pandora. Watercolour and bodycolour, with scratching out,
26.3 X 24.4 cm. (lOVs X 9Vk in.] London, Bankside Gallery (Diploma Collection of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours)
77. John Liston Byam Shaw, ARWS, RI
(1872-1919). The Queen of Spades, 1898.
Watercolour and bodycolour, 178 X 90 cm.
(70 X 36 in.) Private collection

78. Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, RWS (1872-1945).

In the Spring Time, 1901. Watercolour,
39.4 x 26.3 cm. (15
1
: x 103/s in.) Private collection
114 THE AESTHETIC MOVEMENT

of commissions or as loving records of families and friends.

Edward John Poynter exhibited his Portrait of Mrs ].P. Heseltine (Plate 80) at the Dudley Gallery in 1873.
The Art Journal observed: 'This is not a dress portrait, the lady being simply attired in a gown of an ancient
pattern. The features are grave and thoughtful, the artist having followed the prevalent feeling which dispenses
with a simper as an agreeable necessity to portraits.' The sincerity of the watercolour derives from Poynter's
appreciation of the intelligence and sensitivity of the sitter, and the absence of grandiosity or pretension. The
collection of works of art that Sarah and her husband J. P. Heseltine had assembled is alluded to only by the
inclusion in the background of an ebonized stand on which are placed a Chinese bowl and leather bindings.
Walter Crane's portrait of his wife Mary, which he entitled At Home: A Portrait (Plate 2), was painted
during their honeymoon in Rome in 1872, and exhibited at the Royal Academy in the same year. It conveys the
pride and delight that Crane found in the person of his bride, who stands with a Japanese fan in one hand and a
yellow-covered book in the other. Amongst the lovingly depicted ornaments which furnish the Cranes' rented
rooms is a majolica vase inscribed 'Maria'. The arrangement of the room and its contents anticipated the aesthetic
interiors which Crane was to be instrumental in popularizing in London, and the animal decorations of the tiled

chimney-piece are similar to those which he later painted. The tapestry before which Mary Crane stands was of a
kind which Crane particularly admired for its decorative quality. He gives fewer clues to personality in his portrait
than Poynter had done, but entirely satisfies the precept of Aesthetic painting that all the elements of a picture
should be beautifully arranged to combine into a harmonious composition.
Herkomer's portrait of John Ruskin (Plate 9) was published in the form of reproductive mezzotints and
was thus available to a wide audience of Ruskin's admirers. Even though the portrait was criticized when first

exhibited as lacking the sombre and grave character expected of the sage, both the artist and sitter understood its

success to lie in its amiable and pensive quality; Ruskin was often drawn by friends and acolytes and was in
addition a brilliant self-portraitist, but of this work he expressed particular satisfaction, saying on one occasion,
'[it] is full of character, but is not like in the ordinary sense'. Soon after its completion, he wrote in a letter to a

friend: 'I've been quite a prisoner to Mr. Herkomer, who has, however, made a beautiful drawing of me, the first

that has ever given what good may be gleaned out of the clods of my face.'

In the area of portraiture watercolour allowed candid but affectionate accounts of individuals to be made.
During the Aesthetic Movement the modesty and confidentiality of these portraits are reminders of the honesty
and directness of the Victorian watercolourist's view of the world.
Kate Greenaway exhibited her watercolour Misses (Plate 79) at the Royal Academy in 1879. As a

representation of contemporary middle-class childhood it depended both on observation, in the details of dress,

and on exaggerated characterization, in the little girls' demeanour and expressions. Ruskin questioned Greenaway
about how she created such a watercolour:

Do you only draw pretty children out of your head ? In my parish school there are at least twenty prettier than
any in your book [of illustrations] - but they are in costumes neither graceful nor comic - they are not like
blue china - they are not like mushrooms - they are like - very ill-dressed Angels. Could you draw groups of
these as they are? (M.H. Spielmann and G.S. Layard: Kate Greenaway, 1905)

Kate Greenaway's intention in painting Misses was not simply to observe the little girls who were her models, but
to describe their inner personalities and self-conscious moods.

Landscape, like themes from contemporary life, did not generally appeal to the painters of the Aesthetic

Movement. Pure landscape was, however, painted by the Etruscan group of painters, which was formed by a circle
of English artists who worked in Italy. An Italian, Giovanni Costa, was the inspirational figure for this society.
 «-G

79. Kate Greenaway, RWS, RI (1846-1901). Misses, exhibited 1879. Watercolour, 50.2 x 36.2 cm. (19 /4 X
3 WA in.

Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery

80. Sir Edward John Poynter, Bart., PRA, RWS (1836-1919). Portrait of \\n /. P. Heseltine, 1872. Watercolour heightened
with gum arable, 40.5 X 30.5 cm. (16 x 12 in.) Private collection
81. Matthew Ridley Corbet, ARA (1850-1902). Volterra, looking toward* the Pisan Hills, 1898-9. Watercolour, 50.2 X 69.2 cm.
(19 3/4 X 27V4 in.) Collection of Christopher Newall
118 THE AESTHETIC MOVEMENT

Although he maintained that watercolour lacked the expressive potential of oil and discouraged his followers from
using it, various of the artists who revered him were occasional watercolourists.
The painters of the Etruscan circle, who exhibited together at the Dudley Gallery and the Royal Academy,
and from 1877 at the Grosvenor Gallery, were formally associated as a group only in 1882-3. They believed that
the purpose of landscape painting was to express the emotions and affections that are felt for a native or adopted
land, and depended on the selection of the forms of nature rather than on the search for naturalistic truth. 'A
picture should not be painted from nature', Costa pronounced. 'The study which contains the sentiment, the
divine inspiration, should be done from nature. And from this study the picture should be painted at home, and, if

necessary, supplementary studies be made elsewhere.'

George Howard, who became the 9th Earl of Carlisle in 1889, was a dedicated amateur painter and a

committed member of the Etruscan group. He was seldom seen without a sketchbook, drawing-board, or easel in
the course of his frequent peregrinations in Europe, or when at home in Cumberland or Yorkshire. In The Fish-

Pond at Vallombrosa (Plate 1) he resorted to abstract pattern-making in his observation of the reflections of the

trees and sunlit bank and the masonry of the pool-edge.

Another member of the Etruscan circle and a fellow exhibitor with Howard at the Grosvenor Gallery was
Matthew Ridley Corbet. He made painting tours in Tuscany each year and was a close friend of Costa's. His
Volterra, looking towards the Pisan Hills (Plate 81) fulfills the Etruscan principles of landscape painting in every
respect except that of medium. Detail and foreground are subordinate to the geographical character and overall
perspective of the landscape. What is in one sense a specific and accurate view of the Tuscan mountainside may also
be understood as a symbolic representation of a quintessential type of landscape, calculated to remind the viewer of
the sights and sensations of that country.
During the Aesthetic Movement watercolour painting came to express the inner moods and sensibilities of

artists. Veils of subjective and highly personal meaning were drawn over the appearance of the real world and by
this process the disguised and distorted forms assumed symbolic rather than naturalistic meaning.
8LATE VICTORIAN WATERCOLOUR PAINTING

painting had been seen as a separate field of activity to that of

E or the greater part of the Victorian age watercolour
oil painting, but during the last two decades of the

nineteenth century it was gradually integrated into the artistic life of the period. Watercolour was no longer the
preserve of specialists; artists tended to work in all mediums, depending on their moods and pictorial objectives.

Nor were watercolours discriminated against in the exhibition forums of the period. Professional allegiance
assumed less importance. The debate about the status and usefulness of watercolour became less intense and

prejudices against the medium were largely overcome.

After the technical development in the 1890s of methods of colour printing which allowed watercolours to
be reproduced the separate traditions of watercolour painting and illustrative drawing merged. Many of the highly
finished and brightly coloured watercolours of the late Victorian period were reproduced in illustrated books. The
period was also marked by foreign influence and by consequent stylistic innovation. As soon as young painters
began to enrol in Continental schools of art a new approach to the technique and composition of watercolours came
about. George Clausen, for example, studied briefly at the Antwerp Academy and his watercolours reveal both the
landscape of the Low Countries and the powerful influence of the Hague School, including the Maris Brothers and
Anton Mauve.
In Fisher Girls on the Beach (Plate 82) Clausen has dispensed with the finish and detail sought by most of
his contemporaries in England, and abandoned the conventions of perspective and spatial organization which had
been customary in British watercolour painting. The figures of the untidy column of fisher girls form a stark

triangle across the foreground of the composition, and are loosely and expressively sketched. Their bodies are
chopped off at the edges of the composition in a way which suggests the arbitrary selection of a camera snapshop;
the boats at sea, which are restricted to the extreme upper edge of the picture space, are expressed as a blur of brown
sails half-obscured by poor visibility. Although some psychological communication is allowed with the girls at the
head of the column, who stare unselfconsciously at the spectator, the impact of the watercolour depends on its

evocation of a raw and blustery day.

During the 1880s James McNeill Whistler turned increasingly to watercolour, and in doing so brought the
medium into the forefront of aesthetic advance. He exhibited a group of watercolours for the first time in 1884 as
Nocturnes - Harmonies - Chevalet Pieces at the Dowdeswell Gallery. As a watercolourist Whistler was indebted
to the optical lessons of French Impressionism and to the minimalism of form of Japanese art. In addition he was
the spiritual descendant of Turner, whose abstract and beautiful later drawings and colour studies were otherwise
little appreciated or understood. Whistler believed that an artist should select and arrange the appearances of
nature to achieve his own aesthetic purpose. He stated in his 'Ten o'clock' lecture of 1885: 'Nature contains the
elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the artist is born
120 LATE VICTORIAN WATERCOLOUR PAINTING

to pick, and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be beautiful.'
Whistler was one of the artists who rediscovered watercolour's potential for spontaneous and calligraphic
effects. In Chelsea Shops (Plate 83) buildings and figures are suggested by merging and overlapping patches of
colour; areas of the paper have been wetted so as to allow pigment to spread over and into the surface, and to ensure
that colour and detail would be subordinate to atmospheric tone. What might appear superficially to be a
haphazard technique in fact required great deftness and precision and exploited the intrinsic qualities of the

medium and materials. Whistler's aim was to prompt the mind's eye to imagine the scene without reference to

conventional and, to his mind, banal realism.

His attitude towards the type of watercolour painting which displayed meticulous finish and depended on
hours of work is indicated by his remark: 'A picture is finished when all trace of the means used to bring about the
end has disappeared. To say of a picture, as is often said in its praise, that it shows great and earnest labour, is to say

that it is incomplete and unfit for view.'

Whistler was well known for his artistic audacity and pugnaciousness. He came to be seen as
representative of the modern movement in British art, and had both acolytes and imitators. His stylistic

innovations were, however, better appreciated in Scotland than in England. Arthur Melville's Kirkwall (Plate 84)
expresses the dour character of a fishing port in the Orkney Islands; brown and purple colours are blended together
in a surface which is granular and seemingly still wet.
Gradually a more relaxed and informal style of watercolour painting was adopted, and even by artists
whose subject pictures were grandiose relics of history-painting. William Frederick Yeames was typical of late

Victorian academicians who also occasionally painted beautiful watercolours. His On the Boulevards - Dinan -
Brittany (Plate 87) captures the flavour of a French provincial town seen from an unexpected angle. The turrets,
mansard roofs and towering chimney stacks, and the ivy-clad ramparts crenellated by pots of geraniums, seen
beyond a framework of tree-trunks and fencing, make a rich pattern of shapes and colours.
Only during the 1880s did English artistic life come to recognize the presence of a progressive faction
which sought to create a form of painting which was self-consciously modern. The New English Art Club, founded
in 1886, provided a forum for oil painters and some watercolourists who believed that the institutions and

approach of British art was parochial and outmoded. However, the diversity of styles and approaches is indicated
by the Art Journal's comments about the Water-Colour Society's Summer Exhibition of 1886: 'The display made
by the Royal Water-Colour Society includes much work that is of the very finest quality, and also much that is out
of date, if not entirely obsolete.'
In fact, most watercolourists were resistant to European ideas of what constituted modern art, and many
continued to produce works which derived from an idiosyncratic and native tradition. Landscape remained the
principal genre and was treated with a particular concern for the specific character of places. In landscape painting,
as with figurative and imaginary subjects, a revival of Pre-Raphaelite principles of observation occurred; the most
interesting landscape watercolourists who operated in the 1880s and 1890s sought to describe the colours and
natural forms of hidden corners of the countryside rather than give a general impression of the scene. They were
interested in the contrasting characters and subtle variations between the countryside of different localities, and
the way in which the seasons and weather relentlessly determine the appearance of the environment.
Wilmot Pilsbury lived in Leicestershire and painted landscapes and farm subjects which are utterly
convincing. His Landscape in Leicestershire (Plate 85) allows the spectator to breathe the air of the Midlands
farming country; the haphazard distribution of trees and hedges and the patterns of the waterlogged foreground
testify to the artist's fidelity of observation and direct experience of the countryside.
Pilsbury was relatively well known as a watercolourist who exhibited in London and as the head of the
82. Sir George Clausen, RA (1852-1944). Fisher Girls on the Beach, 1880. Watercolour, 41.3 x 26 cm.
(16V4 X 10V4 in.) Bedford, The Cecil Higgins Art Gallery
83. James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903). Chelsea Shops. Watercolour, 12.5 x 21 cm. (4% x 8 lA in.) Washington, D.C.,
Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution
84.Arthur Melville, ARSA, RSW, RWS (1855-1904). Kirkwall, 1880. Watercolour, 36 x 55 cm. [14 X 21 3/4 in.
Glasgow Art Gallery & Museum
85.Wilmot Pilsbury, RWS (1840-1908). Landscape in Leicestershire, 1880. Watercolour and bodycolour, 25.1 X 35.3 cm.
(9% X 13% in.) Collection of Mr and Mrs Michael Bryan

«*
86. William Fraser Garden (1856-1921). A Mill near St Ives, 1889. Watercolour, 28 X 39 cm. (11 X 15 3/s in.) Private collection
126 LATE VICTORIAN WATERCOLOUR PAINTING

Leicester School of Art. By contrast William Fraser Garden was an obscure, and perhaps reclusive, individual who
lived in Bedfordshire in the south Midlands. He was none the less a watercolourist of remarkable talent, whose
works reveal the face of the countryside with extraordinary objectivity. A Mill near St Ives (Plate 86) shows an
ancient water-mill, constructed from brick and wooden clap-boarding and tiles. Miscellaneous sheds are clustered
about the miller's house and are softly reflected in the water of the mill-pool. At the extreme right of the
composition the spire of a parish church rises beyond thatched roofs. The details of architecture and of the trees
and foreground meadow are recorded with pellucid clarity, the result of the artist's minute scrutiny of the scene.
George Marks was a watercolourist associated with the counties of Kent, Surrey and Sussex. Like Pilsbury
and W.F. Garden he developed a most fastidious technique with which to record the unspectacular scenery of

southern England; he tended, like them, to prefer compositions in which the eye is contained within an enclosed
foreground. In At the Edge of Shere Heath (Plate 88) he has studied a rabbit warren amongst gorse bushes, the
brilliant yellow flowers of which strike a jarring note in the otherwise bland scheme of colours.
The pure landscapes of John William North are amongst the most remarkable of all late Victorian

watercolours. Herbert Alexander gave an account of how North adapted his technique in his later work: 'North,
inarticulate, slow, with a mind for minuteness as if he were creating the universe, was gradually perfecting a

water-colour technique which eliminated the use of body colour, at the same time giving pure colour greater depth
and range of tone.'
The Old Pear Tree (Plate 90) is a most harmonious essay in the colours of autumn: golden fruit weighs
down the ravaged trunk and branches of the tree, and the yellows and browns in the foreground and tangled
distance suggest the last still days of the year. The effulgent colours of summer have drained from the landscape,
and fecundity has given way to decay.
North is quoted as having said that 'Pictorial art is a translation of a poem in the language of nature which
cannot be written in words. His ' artistic objective was to give abstract expression to the beauties, both wistful and
joyous, of the countryside. Alexander wrote of his friend:

North's interpretation of nature was like that of the poet. He did not sit down, like the average landscape
painter, in picturesque scenery and arrange it improvingly but living his
; life full of varied interests he waited

until an entrancing moment in the passage of light or some human episode happily related to its

surroundings awoke in his heart the ecstasy which is the poetic state. Then no sacrifice of time or labour was
too great in the searching of nature to aid his revelation. {Old Water-Colour Society's Club, Fifth Annual
Volume, 1927-8)

North's original intention in The Old Pear Tree was to illustrate Spencer's Shepherd's Calender and the
watercolour was first exhibited with the title Cupid in the Pear Tree. He subsequently eliminated the two or three
amorini that he had painted entangled in the tree's branches, and thus made the watercolour a more private and

intimate exploration of an uninhabited landscape.

North had remained in the countryside of Somerset, the beauties of which he had explored with his Idyllist

friends Walker and Pinwell. He was an unpretentious and perhaps eccentric figure in middle age, litle known in the

wider context of artistic life much admired by a circle of friends.

but Herkomer, who owned The Old Pear Tree, was
instrumental in making North's name more famous; and his watercolours of a mythic and yet accessible landscape
became influential for younger watercolourists in the 1890s and after the turn of the century.
Hubert Coutts shared North's interest in the precise evocation of a particular season. His reputation,
however, was restricted to the North of England where he lived and painted. In his large watercolour A Sheep
Farm in the Duddon (Plate 89) he has studied the landscape of the Lake District in early spring. A farmstead is seen
87. William Frederick Yeames, RA (1835-1918). On the Boulevards- Dinan - Brittany. Watercolour, 24., x 34.9 cm.
(9 A
3 X 13 3/4 in.) Private collection
88. George Marks (fl. 1876-1922). At the Edge of Shere Heath,
1890. Watercolour, 55.3 X 36.8 cm. (2VA X 14V2 in.)
Private collection

89. Hubert Coutts, Rl (d. 1921). A Sheep Farm in the Duddon.

Watercolour, 50.8 X 80 cm. (20 x 31 1/: in.) Collection of
Mrs Harriet Dorment
90. John William North, ARA, RVVS (1842-1924). The Old Pear Tree, 1892. Watercolour, 72.4 x 96.4 cm. (28V: x 38 in.

Southampton Art Gallery

130 LATE VICTORIAN WATERCOLOUR PAINTING

below a hillside lit by wintry sunshine and crested with snow; craggy outcrops and stone-built walls appear as grey
masses against a golden background of dead and recently snow-crushed bracken. In the valley bottom sheep graze
on the sparse vegetation while a farmer plants turnips or mangels. The authenticity of a such a view depended on
the artist's own familiarity with the northern landscape, and his experience of its extremes of climate.
A number of watercolourists specialized in the painting of gardens, a late manifestation of the Victorian
love of cataloguing and recording the appearance of the outside world. Watercolour had long been used to show the
appearance of houses in the landscape, but only in the last two decades of the century did the increasing fondness of

landscape painters for specific and secluded subjects and the delicacy and lightness of pure watercolour technique
combine in the painting of garden subjects.
The interest in the theory and history of gardening also led to a spate of books, which were often illustrated
with watercolours by contemporary artists. Roses and Pinks, Levens Hall, Westmorland (Plate 91) by George
Samuel Elgood appeared as a plate in Gertrude Jekyll and Elgood's book Some English Gardens. The watercolour
has a bright freshness of technique which allows a feeling of open daylight to illuminate the whole, and a subtle
translucence of colour in the bright reds and pinks of the foreground roses and the dense bluish-greys of the
topiary. The overall composition is held together by the carefully observed shapes and conjunctions of the sculpted
yew hedges, and by the sense of recession into an atmospheric distance.
Ernest Arthur Rowe was perhaps Elgood's principal rival as a watercolourist of garden subjects; the two
were fellow-exhibitors at the Royal Institute. His view of The Gardens at Campsea Ashe (Plate 92) is more rigidly

organized in its perspective than Elgood's view of the gardens at Levens Hall, but is delightful for the shapes and
contrasting colours of yew hedges and dainty flower-beds.
Men and women found consolation and spiritual refreshment in gardens and Victorian landscape art
served the desire that many felt to escape from the aggressive and competitive world of the cities. Through art they
could meditate on the beauties of wild or cultivated nature.
Lionel Percy Smythe's watercolour Springtime (Plate 93) was perhaps a tribute to Fred Walker, whose
own Spring (see Plate 56) had been painted twenty-one years earlier but remained familiar from Robert Walker
Macbeth's reproductive etching. Smythe observed his model at even closer range than Walker did, and engages the
spectator's sympathy for her as she struggles through the undergrowth of pussy willow.
A luxuriant image of summertime indolence forms the subject of Edward John Gregory's Marooning
(Plate 94). Two girls are seen in an enclosed and densely patterned river landscape; one of them stands on the
gravel banks of the river, while her companion, who reclines blissfully in a canoe, drifts on the river's sluggish

current. The fluency of Gregory's watercolour technique brilliantly conveys the golden light and purple shadows
of a late afternoon in high summer; his use of bodycolour in certain isolated areas causes the foliage and rippling
water to sparkle in the sunshine.
If Gregory offered a vision of an undisturbed setting and gorgeous weather, others revealed a world of
privations and sadness. John Henry Henshall's Behind the Bar (Plate 95) is an elaborate reconstruction of a

London public house, seen from the proprietor's side of the counter. The figures who stand in the public bar
represent a variety of types: a bearded musician or busker, a woman who spoon-feeds her child-in-arms, and an
old fellow who is besought by a younger man to leave the pub. On the left side of the composition is a view into the
private bar or snug where more affluent customers have congregated: a couple whisper to one another and a man
talks to the barmaid. Henshall has given a dispassionate view of working-class life, but the essential moral of his
subject is made clear by the sign 'Roberts Pawnbrokers' seen on the far side of the street, a business which
flourished because of the hardships and exigencies of the lives of the assembled company.
Henshall's Behind the Bar was exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in 1883. It represented a relatively modern
91. George Samuel Elgood, RI (1851-1943). Roses and Pinks, Lcvens Hall. Westmorland, 1892. Watercolour, 31.8 x 49.5 cm.
(12V2 X 19V2 in.) Private collection

92. Ernest Arthur Rowe (d. 1922). The Gardens at Campsea Ashe. Watercolour, 30.5 x 45.7 cm. (12 x 18 in.)
Private collection
93 Lionel Percy Smythe, RA, RWS (1839-1918). Springtime, 1885. Watercolour, 52.7 X 38.7 cm.
(20 3/4 X 151/4 in.) Private collection
94. Edward lohn Gregory, RA, RI (1850-1909). Marooning, 1887. Watercolour and bodycolour, with scratching out, 36.8 X 45.7 cm.
(14 1/: X 18 in. London, Tate Gallery
|
96.Walter Langley, RI (1852-1922). 'But Men must work and
Women must weep', exhibited 1882. Watercolour, 90.5 X 53 cm.
(35% X 20% in.) Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery
 Smith, RI, RWS (fl. 1871-1916). Recalling the Past, 1888. Watercolour, 76.2
x 52.1 cm
97. Carlton Alfred
(30 X 20V2 in.) London, Victoria and Albert Museum
136 LATE VICTORIAN WATERCOLOUR PAINTING

style of watercolour painting, which was concerned with the cast of light over the forms and textures of the
interior. Although the paint is not minutely handled a remarkable sense of physical realism is conveyed.
Two watercolours of scenes of distress from the 1880s, by Walter Langley and Carlton Alfred Smith,
reveal different approaches to the realistic description of interiors. In Langley's 'But Men must work and Women
must weep' (Plate 96) a sombre mood is evoked by drab colours and rough textures. Carlton Smith's Recalling the
Past (Plate 97) is a product of the Victorian fascination with artistic reconstruction and minute detail; each piece of
furniture and each fold of the girl's dress is meticulously described. In both pictures the contents of the interior
depend for their brightness and three-dimensionality on raking light from a single source.

Langley's subject, in which the tragic death of a fisherman is foreshadowedin the anxious faces of the two
women, was inspired both by a real event and by a poetical description of a similar tragedy. One night while
reading Charles Kingsley's The Fishers Langley was alarmed by the signal that warned the fishermen of impending
storm he ; later described how 'He went out into the black night - an awful storm was howling - and he saw the blue
rockets being fired from Penzance as a signal to those who were at sea. The scene was in the last degree impressive -
a fearful constraint to his cosy fireside - and the idea at once suggested itself. ' Carlton Smith's theme seems to be
one of bitter recrimination or despair, felt by a woman who recoils in private misery from a series of letters that she
had sought to destroy.
In the later years of the nineteenth century the lessons of French Impressionism were variously adapted or
ignored by British artists. The virtue of watercolour as a medium in which technical experiments and pictorial

arrangements might be tried out was as important as ever. The French painter Bastien-Lepage insisted that a

painter should always carry a sketchbook, and had told John Lavery to 'Select a person - watch him - then put
down as much as you remember. Never look twice. ' A Rally (Plate 98) may have been painted in response to this
advice; the scale and action of the principal figure, and the use of dramatic foreshortening which places the
foreground figure in conjunction with the opponent, speak of the artist's immediate observation of the scene. The
large oil painting A Tennis Party (Aberdeen Art Gallery) for which this watercolour was a related study seems
static by comparison, and does not express the physical effort of reaching and returning the ball which is seen in A
Rally. Equally, while the oil painting is finished to a consistent level of detail across its panoramic surface, the
watercolour concentrates the spectator's eye on the dynamic movement of the central figure by allowing the
composition's peripheral areas to fade into a granular blur.
Amongst the most technically brilliant watercolours of the nineteenth century were those of Lavery's
friend Joseph Crawhall. The Governess Cart (Plate 99), painted in the very last years of the century, consists of
flickering touches of opaque colour, concentrated at certain points to give intense luminosity, and washes of
transparent watercolour which unify and make harmonious the overall composition. It is an extraordinary
combination of precise delineation and dextrous brilliance of colour, with a near abstraction of calligraphic
handling on a strongly grained linen sheet.
Crawhall learnt from the painting of Whistler the vital importance of a quality of apparent effortlessness
in a picture. The Governess Cart depended not on laborious execution but on an intellectual preparedness to

receive and transmit spontaneously an impression of one's surroundings, linked to extreme deftness of touch. This
remoteness from the physical world, and yet telling approach to it, which was the technical antithesis to the work
of most earlier watercolourists, stemmed from a new and existential aesthetic approach in the closing years of the

nineteenth century.
Sir John Lavcry, RA 11856-1941). A Rally. 1885. Watercolour, 65.9 X 63.4 cm. (26 x 25 in.) Glasgow Art Gallery & Museum
CONCLUSION

art during the reign of

been so prolific or so
Queen
various in
Victoria
its
may
W
have been,
W

range of purposes to which the art was put. Watercolour was seen as a
it is
¥ hatever
hai the qualities and achievements of British
undoubtedly the case that no age before or since has
creativity. In the area of watercolour painting this vast diversity

medium to be
stems from the
used for the expression of the
imagination in pictorial form; but also as a means of recording the appearance of the physical world. At every stage
between these opposite poles of artistic objective painters gave more or less subjective interpretations to the images
that they observed or invented; and many technical adaptations were made to assist the artist's purpose of getting
and transmitting visual information or revealing a private vision of the world.

Victorian watercolour painting reflects a lost view of the world, and allows us to investigate the minds of
the artists of that age. The insights and prejudices, the open-mindedness and dogmatic conviction, the richness of
taste and imperfect discrimination, that are displayed in an art that was on occasions ingenuous and sincere and on
others self-conscious and defensive, are a source of information about a vanished civilization. Watercolour
painting is the most direct and consistent expression of the Victorian artistic sensibility.
 ^tc-iLNu.

99. Joseph Crawhall 1861—1 913

( 1. The Governess Cart. Watercolour and bodycolour on linen, 30.5 x 37.5 cm. (12 x 14% in.)
Glasgow, The Burrell Collection
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

during the second half of the nineteenth century

have quoted extensively from the former
is
A
in the belief that this
detailed account of artistic

contemporary source conveys

The Art Journal and the Magazine
life and preoccupations
given in the pages of the Art Journal and the Magazine of Art;
a feeling both of the
I

minutiae and of the generality of Victorian art. of Art were published in

monthly instalments from 1849 to 1911 and from 1878 to 1903 respectively, and may be consulted at the National
Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Catalogues of the exhibitions held by the various
societies of vvatercolourists may also be seen there.

John Ruskin's The Elements of Drawing was a response to the many requests for instruction and advice
that he received during the time that he taught in the landscape school of the Working Men's College. It was first

published in 1857 and, with The Elements of Perspective and The LawsofFesole, which are also treatises directed at
painters, constitutes Volume XV of Cook and Wedderburn's Library Edition of Ruskin's works, published in
1903-12. Ruskin's other works from which have quoted, Modern Painters and Notes on Samuel Prout and
I

William Hunt, were published in 1843-60 and 1879-80 and constitute Volumes III— VII and part of Volume XIV
respectively, of the Library Edition.
Numerous autobiographies and monographs have been written by and about Victorian artists; however,
these are too many to list here. Students of Victorian art will find an invaluable bibliography at the conclusion of

the third volume of Martin Hardie's Water-Colour Painting in Britain; other useful bibliographies are to be found
in Christopher Wood's Dictionary of Victorian Painters (revised edition 1979); the subject index of the National

Art Library provides a record of more recent publications. Brief biographical accounts of many Victorian
watercolourists are to be found in Huon Mallalieu's Dictionary of British Watercolour Artists (two volumes;
revised edition 1986) and Christopher Wood's aforementioned Dictionary of Victorian Painters. The Annual
Volumes of the Old Water-Colour Society's Club, which have been published since 1924, provide biographical
essays and lists of exhibited works for many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century watercolourists. Those who
want to see a wider range of reproductions of watercolours by Victorian artists are recommended to visit the Witt
Library at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.
The watercolour societies have been described by J.L. Roget, whose History of the Old Water-Colour
Society, now the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours, appeared in 1891, and by Charles Holme, whose The
Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours was published in 1906. I have consulted and quoted from both of
these texts.
The last twenty years have seen a spate of publications and exhibition catalogues of great interest to
anyone who admires Victorian art. Amongst these is Allen Staley's The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape (1973), the
themes of which have a constant bearing on watercolour painting. Exhibitions which have consisted of or included
watercolours have been organized by the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, The Exhibition
 :

141

Watercolor (1981); the Tate Gallery in London, The Pre-Raphaelites (1984); and the British Museum, British
Landscape Watercolours (1985).
The first and foremost general history of Victorian watercolour painting remains the third volume of
Martin Hardie's Water-Colour Painting in Britain, The Victorian Period, which was published after Hardie's
death, in 1968. Conscious of the magisterial importance of this monument of scholarship, have been encouraged
I

by its comprehensiveness and even-handedness towards a more subjective and indulgent selection of plates and
approach to the text in my own book.

PHOTOGRAPHIC CREDITS
The author and publishers are grateful to the following institutions for their kind permission to reproduce
watercolours from their collections. Bedford, The Cecil Higgins Art Gallery (by permission of the Trustees): 82.
Birmingham, Birmingham City Museums & Art Gallery (by courtesy of the Trustees) : 17, 24, 26, 96. Cambridge,
Fitzwilliam Museum (reproduced by permission of the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum): 5, 12, 31, 51.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A., Fogg Art Museum (courtesy of the Harvard University Art Museums) (The
Fogg Art Museum), Bequest- Grenville L. Winthrop: 75. Comston, Brantwood Trust: 7. Edinburgh, St Giles'
Cathedral (by permission of the Minister): 64. Glasgow, The Burrell Collection, Glasgow Museums & Art
Galleries: 99; Glasgow Art Gallery & Museum: 84, 98. Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery: 52, 79. Leeds, Leeds City

Art Gallery, 2. London, Bethnal Green Museum (by courtesy of the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum )

10, 14, 40; British Museum (reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum): 21, 25, 35, 57, 62;
Courtauld Institute Galleries (Witt Collection): 15; Museum of London, 95; National Portrait Gallery, 9; The
Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours (Diploma Collection) (by permission of the Trustees): 76; Tate
Gallery: 41, 94; Victoria and Albert Museum (by courtesy of the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum):
38, 53, 56, 65, 67, 73, 97. Maidstone, Maidstone Museum and Art Gallery: 33. Manchester, Whitworth Art
Gallery, University of Manchester: 13, 27. New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A., Yale Center for British Art, Paul
Mellon Fund: Half-title. Newcastle upon Tyne, Laing Art Gallery: 18; Oxford, Ashmolean Museum: 28,30. Port
Sunlight, Lady Lever Art Gallery (by permission of the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool): 60, 61. Sheffield, The
Ruskin Gallerv - Collection of the Guild of St George: 3, 46, 55. Southampton, Southampton Art Gallery: 90.

Sunderland, Sunderland Museum and Art Gallery: 16. Surrey, Sutton Place Foundation: 4. Washington, D.C.,
U.S.A., Freer Gallery of Art (courtesy of the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution (Accession number
04.315): 83. Watford, Watford Borough Council Museum: 68. Wilmington, Delaware, U.S.A. Delaware Art
Museum (The Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft, Ir. Collection): 29. The Royal Commission on Historical

Monuments of England: Figs. 1, 2.

INDEX

Numbers in italics refer to the plates Crane, Walter 26, 106, 114; At Home: A Portrait, 2; Diana,
72
Aesthetic Movement 26, 76, 103-18 passun Crawhall, Joseph 136; The Governess Cart, 99
Agnew's 27
Alexander, Herbert 18, 126 Dadd, Richard 43, 52; The Artist's Halt in the Desert, 19
Alhngham, Helen 94, 102; South Country Cottage, 69; Young De Morgan, Evelyn 106; Deianira, 74
Customers, 66 Dickens, Charles 92
Alma-Tadema, Anna 76; Eton College Chapel, 54 Doyle, Charles Altamont 92; Saint Giles - His Bells, 64
Alma-Tadema, Sir Lawrence 110; Pandora, 76 Doyle, Richard 92; Under the Dock Leaves - An Autumnal
Austin, Sarah 92 Evening's Dream, 62
Dudley Gallery 24-6, 103, 106

Baldry, A.L. 110

Elgood, George Samuel 130; Roses and Pinks, Levens Hall,
Bastien-Lepage, Jules 136
Westmorland, Frontispiece, 91
Bateman, Robert 26, 103, 106; The Dead Knight, 71
Elsheimer, Adam 43
Bodichon, Barbara 59-60; Ventnor, Isle of Wight, 32
Etruscans, the 114, 118
Boyce, George Price 52, 60, 70; Black Poplars at Pangbourne,
36; Tomb of Mastino II della Scala, 44
Fahey, Edward Henry 94; Old Farm House, 70
Boyle, the Hon. Eleanor Vere 92, 94; 'And a Neglected
Fine Art Society 27
Looking-Glassl And the Child cared nothing about the
Fortescue-Bnckdale, Eleanor 110; In the Spring Time, 78
Looking-Glass, 63
Foster, Myles Birket 31, 32, 59, 60, 64, 94, 102; Lane Scene at
Brett,John 76; View at Great Yarmouth, 48
Hambleden, 41; The Thames from Cliveden, 35
Brown, Ford Madox 46, 50, 58, 71; Elijah and the Widow's
Fripp, Alfred Downing 32; Watching the Porpoises, 14
Son, 22; Hampstead - A Sketch from Nature, 29
Frith, William Powell 43
Bulwer, Rev. James 43
Bunney, John Wharlton 71; Palazzo Manzoni, on the Grand
Garden, William Fraser 126; A Mill near St Ives, 86
Canal, Venice, 46
Gautier, Theophile 36
Burlington Fine Arts Club 27
Gilbert, Sir John 27; The Field of the Cloth of Gold, 11
Burne-Jones, Sir Edward Coley, Bart. 14, 16, 26, 46, 50, 52, 92,
Girtin, Thomas 11
103, 106; Green Summer, 23; Landscape with Willows and
Goodwin, Albert 60, 64; Certosa, near Florence, 37; Old Mill,
Poplars, 26; Phyllis and Demophoon, 24
near Winchester, 34
Burne-Jones, Georgiana 46
Green, Charles 94; 'Something Wrong Somewhere' 65 ,

Burton, Sir Frederick William 32; Dreams, Half-title

Greenaway, Kate 14, 76, 102, 114; Misses, 79; Study of Rock,
Moss and Ivy, 55
Clausen, Sir George 119; Fisher Girls on the Beach, 82 Gregory, Edward John 130; Marooning, 94
Clifford, Edward 46 Grosvenor Gallery 26, 106
Coke, Alfred Sacheverell 106; Eros and Ganymede, 73 Guild of St George 70-1
Cope, Charles West 16; Girl holding a Slate, 6
Corbet, Matthew Ridley 118; Volterra, looking towards the Hague School 119
Pisan Hills, 81 Harding, J.D. 28
Corbould, Edward Henry 14; Saul and the Witch of Endor, 4 Henshall, John Henry 130, 136; Behind the Bar, 95
Costa, Giovanni 114, 118 Herbert, Ruth 52
Coutts, Hubert 126, 130; A Sheep Farm in the Duddon, 89 Herkomer, Sir Hubert von 14, 18, 20, 94, 114, 126; The
Cox, David 28, 31 Naughty Boy, 68; Portrait of Ruskin, 9
Cozens, J.R. 11 Heseltine, J. P. 114
Crane, Mary 114; portrait of, 2 Heseltine, Sarah (Mrs J. P.) 114; portrait of, 80

,M
 NDEX 143

Hinc,Henry George 64, 70, 71; Amberley Castle, 42, Railway Pilsbury, Wilmot 120, 126; Landscape in Leicestershire, 85
Line atCamden Town, 49 Pinwell,George John 14, 83, 126; In a Garden at Cookham,
Holme, Charles 23 59; Gilbert a Becket's Troth, 60
Howard, George, 9th Earl of Carlisle 118; The Fish-Pond at Poynter, Sir Edward John, Bart. 114; Portrait of Mrs ].P.
Vallombrosa, 1 Heseltine, 80
Hunt, Alfred William 16, 18, 60, 64, 71; Finchale Priory, 43; Pre-Raphaelites and Pre-Raphaelitism 13, 18, 31, 36, 45-58
Lucerne, 8; Travelling Cranes, Diving Bell, & etc., on the passim, 59-82 passim, 103, 120
Unfinished Part of Tynemouth Pier, 50 Prout, Samuel 70
Hunt, Violet 18
Hunt, William Henry 13, 14, 26, 27, 31-2, 36, 84; Chaffinch Quilter, Harry 88
Nest and May Blossom, 15; The Outhouse, 12
Hunt, William Holman 45, 52, 64; The Plain of Rephaim from Redgrave, Richard 64; Parkhurst Woods, Abinger, 38
Mount Zion, 27 Rembrandt 26
Rich, Alfred William 31
Idylhsts, the 83-102 passim Robinson, J.C. 20
Inchbold, John William 76; View above Montreux, 53 Roberts, David 43
Roget, J.L. 14, 59
Jekyll, Gertrude 130 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 14, 45, 46, 50-2, 59 110; Arthur's
Jenkins, J.J. 14 Tomb, 21; Writing on the Sand, 25
Rossetti, William Michael 59, 76
Landseer, Sir Edwin 14; Study of a Horse, 5 Rowe, Ernest Arthur 130; The Gardens at Campsea Ashe, 92
Langley, Walter 136; 'But Men must work and Women must Royal Academy 23, 24, 28
Weep', 96 Royal Scottish Academy 27
Lavery, Sir John 136; A Rally, 98 Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Water-Colours 27
Leigh's School 28, 88 Ruskin, John 13-14, 16, 18, 20, 28, 30, 31, 32, 45, 46, 58, 60,
Leighton, Lord 88 64, 70, 71, 76, 82, 84, 92, 106, 110, 114; portrait of, 9; In
Lewis, John Frederick 13, 26, 27, 32, 36, 52; Courtyard of the the Pass of Killiecrankie, 31; The South Side of the Basilica
Painter's House, 17; Easter Day at Rome, 16; Hhareem Life, of St Mark's, Venice, 45; The Walls of Lucerne, 7
Constantinople, 18 Ruysdael 26
Lindsay, Sir Coutts 26
Sandys, Anthony Frederick Augustus 43, 83; A Panoramic
Macbeth, Robert Walker 94, 130; Greeting the Postman, 67 View of Hunworth, 20
Macdonald, Alexander 11; A Study of Opal in Ferrugineous Scott, William Bell 60; Landscape with a Gate and
Jasper from New Guinea, 3 Watermeadow, 33
Malory, Sir Thomas Morte d' Arthur, 46 Seddon, Thomas 52; The Hills of Moab and the Valley of
Marks, George 126; At the Edge of Shere Heath, 88 Hinnom, 28
Melville, Arthur 120; Kirkwall, 84 Shalders, George 64; 'Hide and Seek', 39
Millais, Sir John Everett 45, 83 Shaw, John Liston Byam 110; The Queen of Spades, 77
Millais, William Henry 76; A Fisherman with his Dinghy at Shields, Frederic James 32; The Holly Gatherers, 13
Lulworth Cove, 51 Smith, Carlton Alfred 136; Recalling the Past, 97
Miller (Mr) of Long Acre 16 Smythe, Lionel Percy 130; Springtime, 93
Moore, Albert Joseph 58, 106; Myrtle, 75; Study of an Ash Society of Lady Artists 27
Trunk, 30 Stephens, F.G. 27
Morris, Jane 46
Morris, William 46 Tayler, Frederick 24
Thackeray, William Makepeace 32, 36
New English Art Club 120 Turner, J.M.W. 11, 31
New Water Colours (later the Institute of
Society of Painters in
Painters inWater Colours) 23, 26, 27; Fig. 2, p. 22 Walker, Frederick 14, 24, 32, 83, 84, 88, 92, 94, 126, 130; An
Newman, Henry Roderick 71; View of Florence, from the Amateur, 57; A Fishmonger's Shop, 61; Spring, 56
Gardens of the Palazzo de' Mozzi, 47 Warren, Edmund George 64; 'Rest in the cool and shady
North, John William 16, 18, 20, 24, 83, 84, 92, 126; Halsway Wood', 40
Court, 58; The Old Pear Tree, 90 Whaite, Henry Clarence 76; Castle Rock, Cumberland, 52
Whistler, James McNeill 31, 119-20; Chelsea Shops, 83
Old Water-Colour Society 14, 23-1, 25, 26, 27, 50, 120; Fig. 1, Williamson, George C. 88
p.22
Yeames, William Frederick 120; On the Boulevards - Dinan -
Palmer, Samuel 26, 27, 60; Landscape with Windmill, Figures Brittany, 87
and Cattle, 10
Phillips, Sir Thomas 43 Zambaco, Maria 50
 UBRftRf
BOSTON PUBLIC

321 5
3 9999 00508

Boston Public Library

ND1928
N49
BRIGHT !9c7X
BRANCH LI!
880 182M-22
£R
The Date Doe Card in the pocket in-
dicates the date on or before which
this book should be returned to the
Library.
Please do not remove cards from this
pocket.
 VICTORIAN
WATERCOLOURS
Christopher Ncwall

With 103 illustrations, 101 in colour

This is the first general book on Victorian

watercolours - the most direct expression of
Victorian sensibility and taste. The Victorian
era is the most brilliant phase in the history of
watercolours.
Watercolour painting was the preferred
medium of many English 19th-century artists,
and forms a delightful and fascinating compo-
nent of the art of the Victoria.-" age. It lent itself
readily to the effects of brilliant colour and rich
tone, as well as to literal realism - the principal
qualities of Victorian taste and art.
The medium was chosen by countless
amateur artists as well as by many hundreds of
professionals, to record all aspects of contemp-
orary life and imagination. They documented
the rapidly changing appearance of the land-
scape, architecture and the people themselves,
and in the history of watercolour painting is
revealed that view of itself the Victorian age
sought to hand down to posterity.
Christopher Newall is an art historian
specializing in the 19th century; he is the author
of Society Portraits 1850-1939, catalogue of an
exhibition held at Colnaghi's and The Claren-
don Gallery, London, in 1985, and co-author of
George Price Boyce, catalogue of an exhibition at
the Tate Gallery in 1987.

Jacket illustration: Charles Green, R.I. David

Hall McKewan painting in Knowle Park, 1867.
Watercolour, 6'/2 X 10 in. (here enlarged).
Bourne Gallery.

An illustrated catalogue of Phaidon books

is available on request

Phaidon Press Limited

Littlegate House
St. Ebbe's Street
Oxford
OX1 1SQ

Phaidon
ISBN 7148 2424

£25 Printed in Spain

The Victorian era is a particularly brilliant phase
in the history of watercolour painting,

and its watercolours are the most direct

expression of its sensibility and taste.

isbn a-?ma-EMSM-D

— •