At the beginning of the 18th century, the topographical watercolor was primarily used as an objective record of an actual place in an era before photography. This documenting function is commonly traced to the "landskip" drawing (from the Dutch Landschap) practiced by 17th century Dutch and German artists. But early topographical drawings reject the Dutch appreciation of landscape light, and stick to the visual facts as they appear from a specific view or location — editing out or rearranging incidental features such as vegetation and weather. When human figures appear, they are used as decorative or stereotypical staffage, showing the activities typical of a place or providing a sense of architectural scale.

Ink, pen and watercolor tints were common mapmaking tools, portable and convenient to use outdoors and in remote locations. So early topographical drawings were often the work of surveyors and mapmakers in the service of roadbuilding crews or colonizing armies; the techniques of perspective and topographical drawing were regularly taught in military academies and used to record enemy defensive positions or the customs of conquered peoples.

At the same time, skill in drawing, like skill in converation, dancing and musical performance, was considered a cultural accomplishment among the male and female "young Nobilitie" of Europe. As we'll see in the artists described below, this entwined topographical drawing with the preoccupations of the cultural elite in three ways.

First, landed patrons in England often commissioned topographical portraits of their castles and estates, an expression of the complex and unique importance that English society attached to locale and property. The breadth of this practice is suggested by an enormous creamware table service made by Wedgewood and Bentley in 1774 for the Empress Catherine of Russia, decorated with almost 1300 different topological views of English landmarks, all copied from drawings done on site.

Second, topographers were often employed to record famous stopping points in the Grand Tour through France and Italy (and later Switzerland and the Rhine Valley). This was a fashionable pilgrimage in pursuit of cultural refinement and rustic adventure made by many of the English nobility and prosperous middle class during the 18th century. Thousands of these tinted drawings were accumulated by individual collectors, or were published as engravings or aquatints in the travel journals, prints and art magazines that flourished at century's end.

Finally, topographers recorded the discoveries of 18th century antiquarian, naturalist and archaeological expeditions, many of them funded by a new society of wealthy amateur natural scientists and art collectors, the Society of Dilettanti founded in 1733. Reports of these expeditions were published in limited editions that comprise the foundations of art history, archaeology, anthropology, botany and biology.

All these groups created an insatiable market for accurate yet tastefully designed tinted drawings that could be profitably published as copperplate or steel engravings. Entrepreneurial printers of books and engravings provided a crucial economic stimulus that led to the great flowering of English watercolors in the 19th century. And the obvious requirement that painters work outdoors created a body of paintings and a community of painters that were precursors to the great English landscape painters of the 19th century.

The social status of amateur painters ranged from the nobility or wealthy dilettanti such as Richard Payne Knight (1750-1824), Sir George Greville (1746-1816) and the brilliant but scandalous William Beckford (1760-1844), to talented clergy such as the Rev. William Gilpin or the Rev. Thomas Gisborne, to the thousands of professionals, businessmen, housewives and teenagers who painted for sheer pleasure and social refinement. Almost all of their works have been lost today, but their desire to learn provided the demand for drawing masters and, during the early 19th century, their enthusiasm for portfolio collections nurtured the market in moderately priced watercolor paintings. The topographical style was ideal for amateurs to learn, because the basic method (described in the page on Francis Towne) required little more than an aptitude for drawing with a pen, and the ability to tint the drawing with paint and brush.  

Simple as the style was, drawing masters adapted painting methods to help amateurs make more complex paintings. A few artists became famous for simplifying watercolor technique into mechanical compositional or brushwork tricks. William Payne (1760-1830), inventor of the "payne's gray" mixture used in underpainting, taught his students to block in a painting with broad washes, paint clusters of leaves using a brush tuft split into several points, and create rough, rocklike textures by "dragging" thick paint with the side of the brush tuft. Payne was frequently disparaged for the facility with which he turned out cookbook landscape paintings for students to copy, but this demand for instructional samples soon affected the publishing trade as well. Around 1800 printmakers such as Rudolph Ackermann (1764-1834) began to sell inexpensive topographical etchings that amateurs could use as models for drawing or as simple outlines they could tint on their own (like the coloring books we give to preschool children today). Etchings after Claude or contemporary topographers were also available for study and copying. Amateur tutorials began to appear toward the end of the 18th century, starting with William Craig's rudimentary An Essay on the Study of Nature in Drawing Landscape in 1793. In the following two decades painters such as James Roberts (in 1800), Edward Dayes (in 1805), John Hassell (1808), David Cox (1811 and 1814), Samuel Prout (1813) and John Varley (1816) published several widely circulated painting tutorials in landscape painting and figure drawing. These innovated the "step by step" method of painting instruction that is still used in instructional watercolor books published today.  

The popularity of watercolors was also fueled by the convenience, lower cost and greater availability of commercially made watercolor brushes and paints (described in the brief history of watercolors). However, it's surprising to learn how difficult it often was for painters throughout this era to get their hands on a good watercolor paper: Thomas Gainsborough once offered to pay "a guinea a quire, for a dozen quires" for the paper used to publish a Bath tourist guide; Francis Towne made his Lake District watercolors on an especially heavy, textured paper "I brought myself from Rome"; David Cox used by preference a thick Scottish paper made for wrapping packages. Although James Whatman first marketed in 1780 a handmade watercolor paper with a wove finish (which did not have the obtrusive surface pattern of a laid paper) many artists, including Thomas Girtin, continued to paint on laid or other printer's stock. A relatively inexpensive machinemade paper (known in those days as cartridge paper) was made by Whatman in 1805 at the world's first steam powered paper mill. In hindsight, high quality watercolor paper turned out to be the first uniquely modern development in the history of the medium — just as a complete range of genuinely lightfast pigments has been one of the most recent.

See also The poetic landscape.