Watercolour Society

“ The opening of the Water-Colour Exhibition, in 1805, may be dated as the commencement of Mr. Nicholson’s fame and success in London. In conjunction with Glover, Varley, Prout, and others, an advance in the art of watercolour painting was made, such as to astonish and call forth the admiration of the public.
In a manuscript autobiography which Mr. Nicholson left behind him, and which is full of curious anecdotes, he gives the following account of the formation of that exhibition.
“Messrs. Hills and Pyne asked me to join in the attempt to establish such a society, which I readily agreed to. ”

“ In the Studio, March, 1901, in writing of the exhibition of the American Water-Color Society, the critic says: "In her two works, 'Cherries' and 'A Rose,' Mrs. Rhoda Holmes Nicholls shows us a true water-color executed by a master hand. The subject of each is slight; each stroke of her brush is made once and for all, with a precision and dash that are inspiriting; and you have in each painting the sparkle, the deft lightness of touch, the instantaneous impression of form and coloring that a water-color should have." ”

“ Besides, for some occult reason, the balance always trends in the direction of fault-finding rather than praise, probably because it is so much the easier, for work always has and will have imperfections that are not difficult to distinguish. But in the case of the water-colour before us the critics’ chorus must have been very exhilarating to the young artist, especially as, at the time of its exhibition at the Royal Water-Colour Society, in the spring of 1877, she was by no means in good health. ”

“ He had a gift of colour, a felicity and directness of touch, and a command of his materials, which have never been excelled in his line of art. He treated landscape and architecture with almost equal skill, and though his figures were on a small scale, and often shared but even honours with the scenes in which they were placed, they were always designed with spirit, living in gesture, and right in expression. Among the more important of the drawings exhibited at the Water-colour Society were: ‘After the Sortie,’ 1834 ”

“ No fact better attests the active and prosperous character of American art than the rapid success which the culture of water-colors has achieved among us. In 1865 a collection of English water-color paintings was brought to this country, and exhibited in New York. It attracted much attention; and although a few artists, like Messrs. Parsons and Falconer, had already used this medium here, generally as amateurs, this seems to have been the first occasion that stimulated our artists to follow the art of water-color painting seriously. A society, headed by such men as Messrs. ”

“ The progress of the true art of Water-colour drawing, must necessarily receive a check from the adoption of such a practice, which will doubtless be sanctioned by the idle or the hurried; and attempts to carry out the original prospects and genuine advantages of the transparent medium, will probably become rare, if they should not cease entirely. ”

“ At the gallery in Pall Mall East he exhibited more than three hundred water-colours, and these represent only a small proportion of his life's work, for he was a rapid though a very careful worker. He devoted much time and energy to the service of the Royal Water-colour Society, as it has been called since 1881; this advance and the prosperity which the society has enjoyed in recent years were due in some measure to Hunt's exertions. ”

“ Your water-colour painters are becoming every day capable of expressing greater and better things; and their material is especially adapted to the turn of your best artists' minds. The value which you could accumulate in work of this kind would soon become a most important item in the national art-wealth, if only you would take the little pains necessary to secure its permanence. I am inclined to think, myself, that water-colour ought not to be used on paper at all, but only on vellum, and then, if properly taken care of, the drawing would be almost imperishable. ”

“ But, however, the union of Water-colours with Oil may be advantageous for these purposes, and thus Opaque Water-colours may receive a partial sanction; it cannot be denied that, in the instances previously alluded to, in which the Opaque Water-colours are used for no other purpose than the facility of recovering half-tints that had been too much obscured, the only advantage of Water-colours is abandoned, without obtaining the equivalent of richness, arising from texture in Oil; and the purity of the one art is lost, without attaining the force of the other. ”

“ The water-colour painters can fairly be said to have kept unchanged the essential qualities of their particular form of practice. They have departed scarcely at all from the executive methods which have been recognized as correct for nearly a century, but they have amplified them and have adapted them to a greater range of accomplishment, developing, it Water-Colour. ”

“ At the beginning of the nineteenth century there was a feeling amongst the artists who worked solely in water colours that they were not being fairly treated by the Royal Academy. They were ineligible to be elected members of that body, and they were of opinion that their works were never placed in a prominent position on the walls of the galleries. William Frederick Wells, a friend of Turner and said to have suggested to him the idea of producing his “Liber Studiorum,” proposed to his fellow artists that they should form a separate society for the promotion of water-colour painting. ”

“ The practice of water-colour art would appear to appeal especially to womankind, as not only are the constituents which go to its making of a more agreeable character than those of oil, but the whole machinery necessary for its successful production is more compact and capable of adaptation to the ordinary house. ”

“ But they turned it to practical use, and from their time painters brought the substance and play of colour to a perfection which there is no reason to suppose the ancients ever approached. In modern times water-colour painting, used by the old masters for light sketches and studies, has also become an art of itself, especially in England. ”

“ As water-colour painting has experienced so much revolution of late, arising from its extensive capabilities,—the best drawings, or rather water-colour paintings, being produced by the balance of opaque and transparent colours,—those tints and mixtures that are found most useful in oil-painting, and most wanting in water, has engaged his particular attention. ”

“ No Englishman ever came so near to nature—to the subtleties of nature—in water-colour as do the modern Dutch and French painters. The reader would do well to go to Goupil’s exhibitions of modern Dutch and French painters, which are held from time to time, and keep a look-out for water-colours, and he should carefully study them at the Paris Salon. Prophecy is always risky and of little count, but we would like to venture a prophecy that water-colours will never take a very prominent place in art, because no great genius will ever be content with the medium. ”

“ It remained to our artists towards the end of the last, and early in the present century, to give a new and higher character to water-colour art, which from obscure beginnings has risen to be a purely national and original school. Practised by a succession cf men of great genius, a distinct branch of art has been created, taking rank with works in oil. More luminous, and hardly less powerful than pictures in that medium, it has lent itself, in skilled hands, to the fullest expression of nature, and perfect rendering of the ideal. ”

“ But they belong to an undeveloped stage of the art of water-colour painting. The details of architecture are drawn carefully and accurately, the figures are life-like though rather stiff, and the indications of light and shade explain the shapes of the buildings and knit the whole composition together. But the drawings do not go beyond this. The few pale washes of colour diversify the surface, but do not suggest either colour or atmosphere. Every object, the roadway, figures, buildings and the sky, has the same texture, which makes the general effect monotonous and abstract. ”

“ One thing at any rate photography can claim: that is so long as it can be practised, art can never slip back to the crude work done in some eras of its decadence. Photography has helped many of these feeble wood-cutters immensely, and the épicier-critic calls these works “precious.” It is extraordinary how men will deceive themselves.
Water-colours. Now we come to a branch of art which is essentially English, namely, painting in water-colours. ”

“ Drawing and water-colour painting were reckoned as elegant accomplishments which formed a necessary part of a{2} polite education, and there was not only a host of amateurs who were ready to learn but a number of professional students as well with a real desire to become proficient in a new and attractive form of practice in which art patrons and collectors were showing themselves to be much interested. ”

“ Any of the ordinary non-corrosive pigments or liquid colours, thickened with a little gum, may be employed in this art; preference being, however, given to those that possess the greatest brilliancy, and which dry without spreading. See Stains, &c.
Painting, Water-colour. In its strictest and modern sense, ‘water-colour painting’ means the painting on paper with colours diluted with water. The English school of water-colour painting has produced works which bear comparison with the great masterpieces in oil, and even surpass them in the delicacy of atmospheric effects. ”

“ As a water-colour painter his mission was to stand up for the old tradition of painting entirely in transparent washes, and to protest by quiet insistence against the corruption of the art, as he deemed it, which had been introduced by artists like Walker and George John Pinwell [q. v.] , who used body-colour. Dobson remained a constant exhibitor almost to the last, both at the Royal Academy and at the Old Water-colour Society, contributing about a hundred and twenty pictures to the former and about sixty to the latter gallery. ”

“ Wood, who is president of the Water-color Society, and employs both oil and water colors, spent several of the first years of his career at the South, and discovered of what importance our colored citizens might prove in our art—their squalor, picturesqueness, broad and kindly humor, and the pathos which has invested their fate with unusual interest. This artist's first successful venture in genre was with a painting of a quaint old negro at Baltimore ”

“ As the early indications of so great an artist, these drawings are very curious and interesting; but no person that knows anything of the state of water-colour painting at that period, and previous to the era when Turner, Girtin, and others began to shine out in that new and glorious style, that has since brought water-colour works to their present style of splendour, excellence, and value, will expect anything approaching the perfection of latter days. ”

“ The remedy, therefore, is to patronize only the most reliable makers.
Water-color has many of the charms of pastel, with practically no demerits. Its permanence is amply demonstrated by the cartoons of Raphael and Leonardo, while it gives to our work an airy delicacy that can be secured by no other means. Its only disadvantage is also one of its chief attractions—the element of uncertainty always present, for the color dries out a tone lighter than the freshly applied wash, and of course only long training enables one to discount with absolute certainty this subtle change of tone. ”

“ The pigments, reduced to an impalpable powder, are the same in both classes of processes, which are commonly known as watercolour-painting and oil-painting. That which was of old the artist's greatest stumbling-block—the manufacture and preparation of his pigments—need now no longer occasion him the slightest embarrassment; for every colour with which his palette could be enriched is to be bought, ready prepared, of the principal artists' colourmen. ”

“ The early method prevailed for a long time, as may be seen in the historic collection of water-colour paintings at South Kensington, but gradually the art developed, better pigments were used, and, as early as 1790, a marked improvement accrued, which led to the triumphs of Girtin and Turner, and the more brilliant examples of later days. One great advantage belongs to the modern school of water colours—it started from nature, untrammelled by conventional rules or traditions. The early topographers were brought face to face with nature ”

“ But apply this test to the water-colours of Israels or Mauve, and you will see they interpret nature. But they have painted chiefly in oils, and wisely so, as there is more to be expressed by oil-painting, and we know of few, if any, great men who confine themselves to water-colour as a medium. But it serves the turn of a host of men—painters, but not artists, who, with their pretty paints, make pot-boilers, of which the form and idea are often stolen—stolen, perhaps, from a photograph. Do such ever study nature? ”

“ I have selected the medium of water-color because I believe that more can be done with that than most people are aware. I can work faster with water-color and secure just as brilliant effect as I could in oils. People in general do not know how much can be done with water-color, and I hope that I may live to show them. ”

“ She was elected a member of the New Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1849, and exhibited also landscapes both in water-colours and in oil at the Royal Academy, British Institution, Society of British Artists, and various provincial galleries. ”

“ The author of a recent sketch would cite these water colours as a complete answer to those who like ourselves maintain, in no mere spirit of detraction, that the artist possessed not one particle of genius. Surely he cannot be in earnest. If so, we have only to say, that if painting subjects in oils or water colour from the thousand and one hints to be gathered from history, fiction, or every-day life, be a test of genius, the walls of every summer and winter exhibition—to say nothing of the Royal Academy would be furnished annually with examples from end to end. ”