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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 topographical style was introduced to England by the Bohemian artist Wenceslaus Hollar of Prague (1607-1677), who came to London in 1636 to chronicle in etchings the vast art collection of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, the most distinguished connoisseur and art patron of the period. Hollar remained in England to make a wide range of portrait, architectural and topographical engravings, many issued from 1655 to 1670 by the publisher John Ogilby. His ink drawings resemble etchings (he shades forms with tight parallel lines), and many were tinted with washes of palest color using only blue verditer, yellow ochre, terre verte, vandyke earth and rose madder. Several depict scenes from the English countryside. Though exceptionally talented and extraordinarily hardworking, Hollar was indigent for most of his later life, proving that in the 17th century there was little opportunity for an independent fine artist on paper (political satires and cartoons were a different matter). |
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If we jump ahead a few generations, watercolor painting is still closely allied with military or scientific surveys, but the involvement of affluent patrons and leisured amateur artists becomes more significant. Hollar's most distinguished English follower, Francis Place (1647-1728) lived in Northumbria and began a professional career in law, but by virtue of his family's wealth and property he gradually began to pursue the arts full time. Place enjoyed a wide circle of acquaintances including nobility, wealthy merchants and professionals; some of these formed a group called the "York Virtuosi" that gathered to discuss and investigate artistic and scientific questions of the day. |
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It's a large leap from these rudimentary works to the refined art of Paul Sandby (1730-1809), described by Thomas Gainsborough as "the only man of genius who has painted real views from Nature in this country". Sandby is often called "the father of the English watercolor" because he made so many technical advances, taught so many talented students, and created so many splendid paintings that capture the uniquely English love of nature and work. Son of a Nottingham textile artisan, Sandby was taught to paint by his older brother, the architect Thomas Sandby (1723-1798), who also secured him a post as draftsman in the Military Drawing Office at London. Young Sandby started painting in watercolors as a diversion while on a surveying expedition to Scotland in 1747-52; from the first his talent for human interest makes his work distinctive. In 1753 Sandby lodged with his brother in Windsor Park and launched a career as a drawing master, engraver, and painter to the nobility. He soon earned the favor of the Royal family and of Sir Joseph Banks, who became one of Sandby's most important patrons. Many of his freshest early watercolors, infused with light and gentle color, show scenes around the Royal buildings of Windsor. |
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The leap in style from Place to Sandby is demonstrated most clearly in Sandby's enthusiastic use of bodycolor for "finished" or especially large pictures, often with little or no pen drawing. This reflected the influence of painters in the poetic landscape tradition, such as William Taverner or the gouache landscape artist Francesco Zuccarelli, who was active in London during 1752-73 and, like Sandby, was a founding member of the Royal Academy. In his bodycolor works Sandby's palette is typically larger and his color effects more dramatic, but his mastery of both the poetic and topographical styles allowed him to creatively combine the two styles in his late paintings. His Morning: View on the Road Near Bayswater Turnpike (1790, 65x89cm) again shows people actively engaged with their surroundings (in this case the Old Swan Inn, located not far from the London home that Sandby acquired in 1760), but many elements of the poetic landscape or genre painting have been introduced: the dramatic use of light, lyrical rendering of trees, the large format, and lack of architectural monument. Sandby's mastery of gouache and his stylistic innovations were only part of his innovative artistic personality. He was also one of the founding members of the Royal Academy in 1768 (the year of his appointment as drawing master to the Royal Military Academy near London); he was an avid experimenter with watercolor media (in one letter he enthusiastically recommends black paint made from burned pastries or charred green peas); and his excursion through North Wales in 1771 with his patron Sir William Watkin was one of the first picturesque tours in that part of the country. A major aspect of Sandby's achievement was in etching: his artistic influence reached its peak with the publication of the collected etchings in his Virtuosi's Museum in 1778-81; his Twelve Views of South Wales (1775) launched the popularity of Wales as a picturesque sketching location and were the first aquatints published in England. Sandby refined and popularized the technique of aquatint etching, invented in France in the 1760's, by applying acid to a plate masked with a liquid spirit ground rather than the resin dust used in the French style. Through his innovations and published examples, hand colored aquatints became a frequently used English method for translating topographical watercolors into prints and book illustrations. Finally, Sandby was a diligent worker: a friend noted that he was "indefagitable in cultivating his powers as an artist. He commenced painting in water-colours very early in the morning; the pencil [brush], and frequently the pen, seldom quitted his hand until evening." Although he exhibited at the Royal Academy every year from 1769 to his death in 1809, his adherence to the fundamentally documentary aims of the topological style caused his works to fall from fashion in the 1790's, and his remarkable artistic achievements were prematurely eclipsed by the Romantic generation of painters. Yet Sandby's efforts to bring emotional warmth and human interest to watercolor drawing, and his boundless energy as a technical innovator, Academy founder and generously supportive colleague to fellow artists, were the important founding acts by which English painters made watercolors into a geniunely national art form. |
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Among Paul Sandby's many drawing students was the precocious Michael 'Angelo' Rooker (1746-1801), who "drew buildings as if he loved every brick and stone," according to Martin Hardie. Rooker learned engraving from his father (a popular comedic actor), and after lessons in the 1760's with Sandby (who nicknamed him after the Italian artist), Rooker entered the newly established Royal Academy Schools in 1769 and was one of the first artists to be elected Associate of the Royal Academy (ARA) in 1770. |
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In the majority of topographical drawings, the emphasis is on documenting specific buildings or places. Known for his elegantly precise topographical skills, William Pars (1742-1782) was the son of a metal engraver. He started his career as a successful portrait painter, but in 1764 was hired to accompany Richard Chandler and Nicholas Revett on a two year archaeological expedition to Asia Minor, funded by the Society of Dilettanti. Pars made the transition to topographer easily, recording the antiquities with masterful precision and subtle poetry, and apparently adding color to his paintings while still working on site (at the time an unusual practice). The drawings Pars made were engraved and published in Antiquities of Ionia (1769) and in Revett's ongoing series, Antiquities of Athens. In 1770 Pars was elected to the Royal Academy, the same year he joined his patron Henry Temple, Lord Palmerston in a scientific exploration of the Swiss Alps guided by the Swiss naturalist Horace-Bénedict de Saussure. The drawings from this tour, made with pen, ink and transparent watercolor, with frequent use of gouache for richer color and gum varnish to darken shadows, were the first Alpine drawings shown in London (in 1771), and they are impressive drawings even today for the way they combine an almost photographic realism with a lyrical feeling for the grandeur and sheer scale of the mountain peaks. |
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One of the most poetic of the topographers and a favorite of Dr. Thomas Munro, Thomas Hearne (1744-1817) left Wiltshire in his teens to work as a pastry cook in London before an apprenticeship during 1765-71 with the engraver William Wollett. He spent the years 1771-75 in the Leeward Islands as official artist to the Governor-General, Sir Ralph Payne. His commission was to record the harbors, towns and scenery of the West Indies colonial territory. Upon his return to London in 1775, Hearne quickly established himself as the leading topographical artist of his generation. |
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John 'Warwick' Smith (1749-1831) is among the last practitioners of the topographical tradition. Son of a Cumberland gardener, Smith studied under Sawrey Gilpin, who introduced him to the Earl of Warwick. This patron generously supported Smith on a long excursion through Italy (1775-81), where he met and worked with expatriate English artists, including Thomas Hearne. Smith travelled back to London through the Alps with Francis Towne, settled in Warwick (central England), and spent the next several years working his Italian sketches into exhibition paintings and touring Wales and the Lake District. His Italian drawings were engraved and published as Select Views in Italy (1792-99), and his drawings of Wales as aquatints in Tour Through Parts of Wales (1794). Smith joined the Old Water-Colour Society in 1805 and contributed many works to the Society exhibitions, though by then his style of carefully tinted drawing was out of fashion. Study of Stonework in the Coluseum (1776, 39x53cm) |
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Watercolor painting remained a skill common to professional architects and draftsmen, military officers and surveyors, engravers and natural scientists. But during the period 1750 to 1850 the number of amateur artists significantly increased, and provided crucial momentum for the development of watercolor painting. The qualifications to be an amateur painter then, as described by Martin Hardie, might well apply to amateur painters of today: sufficient prosperity to afford leisure time; the cultural education to value art; a talent for drawing; the confidence and persistence to pursue painting without too much reliance on the judgments of others; and the supportive interest of a small circle of family, friends or fellow amateurs. These qualities are all associated with the economic prosperity, educated workforce and urban culture that transformed England from the kingdom of Tom Jones to the empire of Queen Victoria. 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. The topographical tradition is explored from different points of view in several studies of early watercolor painting. Most are currently out of print, but available from any good art library or online used bookstore. As always, the most comprehensive and informative resource is Martin Hardie's Water-Colour Painting in Britain: I. The Eighteenth Century (Batsford, 1966). For a very basic orientation, there is a skimming survey of 18th century painting in English Watercolors by Graham Reynolds (New Amsterdam, 1988), one of England's foremost scholars of watercolor art who seems to say little with authority. A brief overview of the topographical tradition opens the first chapter of Nineteenth-Century Watercolors by Christopher Finch (Abbeville Press, 1991). A more in depth art historical discussion, with many fine reproductions, is in The Great Age of British Watercolours: 1750-1880 by Andrew Wilton and Anne Lyles (Prestel, 1993). A superb and compact visual survey of English landscape painting from 1600-1880 is provided by Nature Into Art: English Landscape Watercolors from the British Museum (British Museum Press, 1991), with introductory essay and notes by Lindsay Stainton. Michael Clarke's The Tempting Prospect: A Social History of English Watercolors (British Museum Publications, 1981) describes the major artists, patronage system, art markets, "drawing masters" and amateur painters involved with topographical and landscape watercolors through the middle of the 19th century. For an excellent study of Paul Sandby, see Paul and Thomas Sandby by Luke Herrmann (Batsford, 1986). In the same series is Patrick Conner's Michael Angelo Rooker (Batsford, 1984). Finally, an unusual selection of works is reproduced with a very insightful introduction and notes in British Landscape Watercolors: 1750-1850 by Jane Munro (New Amsterdam, 1994). All these books have references to additional sources. |
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