Book Description
Since its creation in the early years of the twentieth century, Sir Hickman Bacon's collection of British landscape drawings and watercolors has been recognized as the best private holding of such works anywhere in the world. Sir Hickman Bacon had advanced tastes for his time, favoring the late, ethereal Turner watercolors that became widely popular only with the advent of abstract painting in the 1940s and 1950s. Turner's friend Thomas Girton, one of the first artists to exploit watercolor as a medium in its own right, is also prominently represented, demonstrating the visual, spatial, emotional, and technical breadth of his landscape art. One of the glories of the collection is its group of watercolors by another of Turner's contemporaries, John Sell Cotman. Sir Hickman Bacon began collecting these works, astonishing in their apparent modernity, long before the First World War, when the artist's reputation was only just beginning to emerge from total obscurity; his work really began to become popular only in the 1920s. Other nineteenth-century watercolors, by both English and French artists, anticipate Impressionism in their growing freedom of expression. This, the first English-language publication on the collection, offers a critical text and full-color reproductions of these important and little-known works.
About the Author
Eric Shanes is a painter and freelance art historian and lecturer. He is Chairman of The Turner Society.
Golden Age of Watercolours FROM THE PUBLISHER
"Watercolour flourished as an artistic medium in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. Its transparency afforded both rich colour and exact tonal control, while its portability, speed of drying and relative technical ease permitted direct contact with nature, as well as great expressivity. The spontaneity of watercolour made it the perfect medium for capturing the fleeting light and weather effects of Britain, and, because of it, there arose a group of painters who put English art on the global cultural map." These 'Golden Age' watercolourists included John Robert Cozens, Thomas Girtin, J.M.W. Turner, John Sell Cotman, David Cox and Peter de Wint. Cozens expanded the spatial breadth and character of landscape images, influencing both Girtin and Turner. Turner used watercolour to search for future images, producing a body of work that prefigures abstract painting. For Cotman, watercolour permitted a highly lucid method of representing reality, while it allowed Cox great expressiveness and de Wint the ability to find his imagery within the very act of painting itself. Such later artists as Louis Francia, Richard Parkes Bonington, Thomas Shotter Boys, William James Miller and John Frederick Lewis equally employed watercolour in the most virtuosic ways possible.
Art & Photography
Book Info
