1000 Watercolours of Genius

ARTISTS

INTRODUCTION

Is watercolour the oldest painting technique in world history? Be it in the caves of Lascaux or the ancient petroglyphs in Egypt and Greece, colour pigment mixed in water was always found. In the Middle Ages, the book painters used water-thinned colours to illustrate manuscripts. Each miniature on vellum paper in more or less opaque colours formed the origin of modern watercolour which we know today.

The Renaissance painters used watercolour for studies and modelli. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), for example, produced a considerable number of drawings on which he used various techniques and complementary mediums, including watercolour, which served to better bring out his drawn lines. Towards the end of the 15th century, with Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) came the first widely recognised artist in appearance who fully committed himself to watercolour: He created around one hundred of them, which made him the first established watercolourist in art history. Later, it was the genre artists of landscape painting who appropriated the watercolour technique and recognised the advantages that the technique had in respect to the presentation of light effect.

Despite it all, it was a long road until watercolour paintings were considered a true, independent art form. In its history, it was always subject to the current tastes and the technical achievements of the the respective epoch. Partly discredited, partly thrust into obscurity, watercolour first received a definition, in the strict sense, at the end of the 18th century. For a long time it appeared as a foundationless art form because, conceptually, it was ill-defined. Watercolour paintings were considered scattered, a pasttime, an amateurish art. In fact, the existence of watercolours was rarely mentioned in texts before the 19th century, or the concepts were, to some degree, arbitrarily used: Even in 1757, none other than Denis Dierot (1713-1784) used the word ‘gouache‘ incorrectly.

Even when the technique itself, especially when compared to oil painting, was subjected to the opinion of ‘less worthy’, artists were still never tired of working with it and perfecting it. Dürer received more fame for his works in oil, and his etchings and wood cuttings, which were commissioned. Even so, he still busied himself equally with watercolour as much as he could in order to express himself more freely and spontaneously. In France, the watercolourists were permitted into the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in the last decade of the 18th century under Louis XVI. Some years later in England, in 1804, the founding of the Society of Painters in Water Colours created recognition of watercolour as an official, independent art form.

The Seach for a Definition of Watercolours.

"In the old manuscripts, the texts were decorated with illustrations and figures, which were produced on vellum or the skin of stillborn calves. One viewed the first miniatures in such works [...]; the genre was perfected in Italy, Germany, and especially France, where it made rapid progress under Karl V.; still the invention of printing made sure, with its high paper output, that the miniatures were abandoned. The artists, who had prescribed to this exquisite genre, created delicate figures which one framed, later portraits, with which one decorated candy boxes, bracelets, and finally, trays. The colours were applied as gouache, that means thick and often mixed with white, which gave it a floury and plaster-like look. Watercolour was the result of perfecting gouache and the miniatures; it can be applied to numerous genres and is gradually expanding following the transition of art today. (Frederic August Antoine Goupil., Traité d’aquarelle et de lavis en six leçons [discourse on watercolour and washing in six lectures, 1858]

The word ‘watercolour‘ as we understand it today, was first used quite late in the language of art collection. The words watercolour in English and acquerello in Italian - which arose from aquarelle in French, Aquarell in German and acuarela in Spanish - went rather early into the necessary vocabulary. They literally mean watercolour or painting. Despite this relatively conceptual meaning, they were first recorded in the dictionary in the middle of the 19th century. Therefore, the vocabulary exhibits, the text in relation to the watercolour painting, a certain arbitrariness. We consider them as the technique of painting with water, and so distemper, washing, and gouache could also be considered the beginning of watercolour. For this reason, it seems impossible to explain the history of watercolour without giving these older methods attention beforehand.

Distemper painting is a technique by which the colour is first mixed with water and subsequently, in order, thinned out with warm hide glue or arabic gum. The technique enjoyed great popularity before oil painting was invented. Opposite of watercolour, distemper was used on canvas or wood. The only point of view that connects it with watercolour is the fact that its application was attributed to waterpainting. Washing is a procedure that equally presents the characteristics of drawing and painting and is based on the application of pigment, mainly black Indian ink, which gets dissolved in water. This procedure was common in the 17th century and exerted a great influence on the English watercolourists of the 19th century. Today, washing is considered the main technique of watercolour as an artistic genre. Its transparent colour layers allow it to translate the particular effect of light and dark in a very nuanced manner.

Concerning gouache, it is certainly the technique similar to watercolour and is most closely tied to it. It is an opaque technique of thick consistency, that is prepared by combining colour with arabic gum-mixed water. Watercolour and gouache were often applied in works together. For a long time the two techniques have only been vaguely differentiated.

There exist more concepts in English to describe this technique: gouache, opaque, watercolour or bodycolour. To this day, it is customary to use the word gouache for all three terms. In the 19th century the watercolourists got the idea that authentic watercolour must be free from gouache technique in order to be completely pure. Because of this, ‘watercolour‘ is defined as the primary painting technique by which triturated pigment is mixed with water and applied to paper, which creates a transparent effect.

At the time, the artists’ aspiration for transparency formed the starting point for stylistic research. In reality, the technique later developed itself to this purpose by using new tools: knives, brushes, sponges, rags, and also fingernails. The anecdotes about the painting Helvoetsluys; - the City of Utrecht, 64, Going to Sea by Turner (1775-1851) illustrated this: After his work was hung in the Paris Salon in 1832, it seemed to him so graceless that he had added a red fleck to the ocean with his finger, which he transformed into a buoy.

A Controversial Technique

"And never yet did insurrection want / Such water-colours to impaint his cause." [Henry IV., Part 1. Act V, Scene 1, Verse 1597]

"Jamais révolte n’a manqué / De ces enluminures pour en revêtir sa cause." [William Shakespeare, ibid., Übersetzung von François Guizot, 1863]

"Und niemals fehlten solche Wasserfarben / Dem Aufruhr, seine Sache zu bemalen." [William Shakespeare, ibid., Übersetzung von August Wilhelm Schlegel und Dorothea Tieck, 1800]

In 1597, William Shakespeare (1564-1616) used the compound word water-colours in Henry IV. The English and the German version refer to the word aquarell, as we use it today. In French, however, François Guizot (1787-1874) decided to translate the same term with ‘enluminures‘. And actually, watercolour did indeed develop, as we have seen, initially within the art form of enluminure (book painting). The German translation, ‘Wasserfarbe’, followed the original English meaning instead of using ‘Aquarell‘.

The French lyricist Yves Bonnefoy (born in 1923) chose a more recent translation of the same verse for the following wording: "Jamais certes une insurrection n’a manqué / De ces couleurs d’un sou pour orner sa cause…" This word choice, which in German could be reproduced more or less as ‘grosch colours‘, discreetly refers to an inexpensive painting that William Shakespeare spoke of when he used ‘water-colours‘, which is effortlessly completed, and thus, is also easy to obtain both technically and price-wise. In reality, watercolour painting also has the reputation of being an economic art form: economic in regard to the funds, in that it is cheaper than oil, economic in regard to expenditure of time, in that it dries faster, and economic in regard to its proportions, in that the artists, different than with oil paintings, usually work in smaller formats, in drawing books etc.

With end of the 15th century, watercolour technique was, due to the great expeditions to hitherto unknown regions, more widely used: It allowed the new landscapes as well as the newly discovered species to be quickly sketched. It also proved itself useful in scientific studies. Botanists and cartographers resorted to watercolour without, however, being considered an artist.

Up until that point, watercolour held the status of a mere auxiliary tool, a routine practice. In the 19th and 20th century, under the painters, the Orientalists strove towards those worlds that offered them new and brilliant colours, then, equipped with their tubes of paint, they frenetically filled their sketchpads and followed the example of Paul Klee, who during his trip to Tunisia wrote in his journal:

Wednesday, the 8.4. Tunisia. The head full of the nightly impressions of yesterday’s evening. Art – nature – me. Immediately began to work and painted watercolour in the arab quarter. The syntheses of urban architecture – architecture under attack. Still not pure, but fully appealing, something with much travelling mood and passion for travel here, also the ego.

(The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1914)

Art of the poor, art of amateurs, strictly functional art – for a long time watercolour painting lacked recognition on the part of the professional art world. Only when painters began to prefer this medium over oil was it met with gradual respect. The history of watercolour took on a new turn: It’s production rapidly increased, and it expanded. By the 19th century, artists like Turner and Delacroix (1798-1863) and later Cézanne (1839-1906) and Kandinsky (1866-1944) and also Klee, all of them celebrated by critics, encouraged the idea that this art inherently revealed beauty and gave it value in the eyes of artists and the general public. The newly won acceptance was now manifested: Works that were only produced with resources of watercolour technique were exhibited in the official salons, side by side with traditional oil paintings. Charles Baudelaire‘s (1821-1867) commentary in his Salon of 1846 also shows evidence of that new appreciation.

This watercolour painted lion has, in addition to the grace of the drawing and the attitude, a great value to me: that it was painted with great kindheartedness. Watercolour is limited to its modest role, and it does not seek to emulate oil painting. [Charles Baudelaire, Salon of 1846]

One hundred years later, the artist Paul Colin (1892-1985) wrote about Johan Barthold Jongkind (1819-1891)

"The watercolours of Jongkinds: the long phase which stretches from Nivernais to Dauphine, is that in which he completely obtains mastery – in which the genius synthetically notes that it is intrinsically him in the highest degree and offers him the best advantages to administer his finest, liveliest, unexpected washings. Every sheet is a daring exploit that only he could succeed at; and still, nothing seems simpler, nothing more obvious, nothing more banal as that hasty game with the paintbrush, in which – with some bister strokes in blue and green, which he lays just over a little more than indicated structure – he captures the essence of the land, which he presents in an image and not just the landscape that expands before him." [Paul Colin, J. B. Jongkind, 1931]

Watercolour: Painting or Drawing?

If for a long time watercolour suffered from a lack of recognition, it is this fact that can explain its hybrid character. The artists of the Renaissance used watercolour painting to colour drawings, studies and modelli: One, therefore, spoke of ‘colouring‘, ‘watercoloured drawings‘ and ‘topographic washing‘. In these cases they were viewed as a decorative medium. Before it could free itself from the obligatory pencil sketch, watercolour was used as a mere accessory to other techniques. However, it had difficulty establishing itself as an independent process. The emergence of new techniques also played a decisive roll in the development of the watercolour art form. The use of water-thinned colour was complicated until chemical colours and resistent paper was invented.

Never, at no time, had watercolour managed to attain that brilliance of colour; never before had the sparseness of the chemically generated colour spritzed such an evocative gem of sparkle on paper, such a shimmer, similar to that of church windows, through with the sunbeams gleam, such a fabulous, dazzling splendour of materials and of flesh. (Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, 1884)

Watercolour is a work in colour. Originating from the ‘La Querelle des Colouris‘ (The Dispute over Colour) titled aesthetic debate of the 17th century, watercolour thus found itself in an in-between state. It beheld the alleged intelligence of drawing and the charm of colour. Still, this dual quality was not awarded to it without a fight, and the ambiguity of its existence gave it more of a disadvantage than an advantage. As a work in colour it was naturally more closely affiliated with painting; watercolour, however, was produced on paper. In the museums, this type of art work was stored in the hall for graphic arts, next to drawings and sketches. The material paper is, therefore, inextricably associated with this technique. This is the reason why afterterwards Delacroix felt,

The charm of watercolour, in contrast to every oil painting, reddish and faded [...] that lies in this incessant transparency of papers; this proves that this quality is shattered if one resorts, even a little bit, to gouache; in gouache, it is completely lost. [Eugène Delacroix, My Journal, 6 October 1847]

The goal of this volume is, therefore, to trace the complex history of watercolour, which was initially disregarded by critics and later praised. Numerous images should contribute to the characteristics and trends of the respective epochs as well as the manner of illustration, and how, during the changing centuries, the watercolour paintings pushed through until it finally became a recognised art form. Every chapter focuses on a specific aspect of watercolour painting in addition to an overall portrayal of the development of the respective epoch. We will see that all of the great masters worked with watercolour painting and left behind brilliant watercolours which this volume holds ready for (re)discovery.

1. Queen Mary Master, English. Noah and the Ark from the Queen Mary Psalter, c. 1310-1320. Ink on parchment. British Library, London. Late Middle Ages.

14TH - 15TH CENTURIES

From the first third of the 14th century to the middle of the 15th century, the Hundred Years‘ War carried social tension and instability around Europe and greatly shaped this period. Despite the conflict, influential families drove the development of the ‘international‘ forward. This exchange between various courts pushed the formation of the artist movement of soft styles in the late Gothic. The artists travelled from court to court and left behind their manner, style and technique. They all distinguished themseves through their efforts towards refinement and daintiness.

The illustration of manuscripts is one of the art forms that flourished in this era. As a symbol of such finesse, which was considered ideal at the time, they represented a significant step in the history of watercolour. The artists dissolved coloured ink in water, which was applied to vellum in delicate brushstrokes. If the more or less 1,320 existing illustrated drawings in Psalter of the Queen Mary (ill. 1 and ill. 6) are unrealistic, so are the miniatures of the hour books Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry from the Limbourg brothers (c. 1385-1416) almost overflowing with details. They are indeed not free from schematism, but testify to the honest desire of the artist to capture daily life. For example, May (ill. 7) presents the traditional cavalcade of 1 May; the numerous figures, the buildings in the background, and the astrological image piece are carefully produced over the actual illustration. This was also the first time that miniatures were produced in full page; thus, the genesis announced the autonomous works of watercolour painting. Later, Barthélemy d’Eyck (active 1444-1469) would finish the work of the Limbourg brothers on Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry before he went into the service of King René I. d’Anjou (1409-1480) and illustratate for him the Tournament Book (ill. 29). His miniatures are, with the help of the washing technique, accentuated ink drawings, which allowed the artist to play with the effect of light-dark: He got close to modern watercolour with the techniques that he applied.

During the 15th century, northern art received the characteristics of soft styles, whereby it, especially in regards to the artistic implementation of depicted objects, perfected nature and flowers. With his Study of Peonies (ill. 32), Martin Schongauer (1450/1453-1491) provided one of the first botanical studies. For this purpose, the plants were drawn from various angles in full bloom or in budding stage. He reached a subtle tone in which he applied the washing technique and the use of gouache in order to bring out the details of the application. With the help of watercolour technique, Schongauer became a great pioneer of botanical studies, which developed in the following century.

Meanwhile, in Italy entirely new issues arose. The Medici family played an important roll in the development of art; Cosimo the Elder (1389-1464) and later Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449-1492) were important patrons who supported artists like Sandra Botticelli (1445-1510), Filippino Lippi (1457-1504), and Leonardo da Vanci (1452-1519). During that time, Florence became the capital of the early Renaissance. This time was punctuated by diverse innovations, especially in the field of art with the pioneer work in regards to principal perspective contributed by Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446). This made it possible to create a great illusion in the two-dimensional painting, where an impression of three-dimentionality was produced – a veritable revolution.

New aspirations were formed with the birth of Humanism and also on an intellectual level. Italian artists, which brought as much interest to people as nature, celebrated the beauty of bodies, the grace of the lineaments and the harmony of form. Art emancipated itself: The time of applications of purely religious points of view was over. Now they sought to be a mirror of reality. In order to better be able to comprehend the nature which surrounded them, artists invented the method of sketching. This preparatory phase of works allowed the painters to test out and compare various viewpoints of the same objects. In this stage, some also used colour pigment, which they mixed with water, in order to elevate their work and get it closer to reality. Botticelli’s drawing Pallas Athene (ill. 27) illustrated the humanistic purpose of the artist by capturing the real movement of the body through the doubling of the head of a young girl.

As a result of the growing wealth, which the market entered, and the new intellectual alignment, art came to know an appreciation, not least in terms of materials which were available to it. During this time, artists began to find an aversion to the egg-based tempera technique and found preference in oil painting instead. This technique was used for hundreds of years, however, it initially established itself across the board in the 15th century, later in the north, and as a result, in the south as well. The oil painting had enormous success, and to this day, is the prefered method of painting. During this time, the technique of watercolour was still in its infancy. Its history had just began.

2. Pisanello (Antonio Pisano), c. 1395-1455, Italian. European Bee-Eater, Perched on a Flowering Stalk; Sketch of Bird’s Feet, date uknown. Watercolour, quill and brown ink, white lead, metalpoint, quill (for the flowered stem), 11.4 x 17.5 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Early Renaissance.

3. Pisanello (Antonio Pisano), c. 1395-1455, Italian. Two Studies of a Deer, in Profile and from the Left, date unknown. Metalpoint, the head of the deer on the left finished in watercolour, 20.3 x 25.5 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Early Renaissance.

4. Giovannino de’ Grassi, c. 1350-1389, Italian. Two Young Women Playing Music, 1380-1398. Quill, ink and watercolour on parchment, 26 x 19 cm. Civica Biblioteca Angelo Mai, Bergamo. International Gothic.

5. Giovannino de’ Grassi,c. 1350-1398, Italian. A Lion Eating a Deer, 1380-1398. Ink, traces of silver shades, white tempera and watercolour on parchment, 26 x 19 cm. Civica Biblioteca Angelo Mai, Bergamo. International Gothic.

6. Queen Mary Master, English. Hunting Scene from the Queen Mary Psalter, c. 1310-1320. Ink on parchment. British Library, London. Late Middle Ages.

7. Paul, Johan, and Herman Limbourg, c. 1385-1416, Dutch. May from the Trés Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, 1410-1416. Manuscript illumination,