The Development of British Landscape Painting in Water-Colours

The first attempt to form an historical series of British water-colours for the public use was begun in 1857, by Samuel Redgrave for the Science and Art Department of what was then the Board of Education. Thanks to Redgrave’s knowledge and enthusiasm a worthy collection of examples of the works of the founders of the school was soon got together, and this nucleus was rapidly enlarged by purchases, gifts, and bequests. These drawings were housed and exhibited in what was then called the South Kensington Museum, and in 1877 Redgrave published an admirable “Descriptive Catalogue” of the collection. As an introduction to this catalogue he wrote a valuable account of the origin and historical development of the art. Both the official character of this publication as well as its intrinsic merits, literary and historical—for Redgrave and his brother Richard, who had assisted him in the work, were two of the best informed historians of English art in the last century—combined to make it at the time and for many years afterwards the standard and most authoritative book on this subject. But its historical part has one serious defect, due perhaps to some extent to the unfortunate association of science with art in the same museum. Redgrave’s conception of artistic development was evidently borrowed ready-made from the ideas of his scientific colleagues. He treats the chronological arrangement of the drawings in exactly the same way as the men of science treat the successive alterations and improvements which Stevenson’s first model steam-engine underwent; and as he found the earlier drawings approached very nearly to monochrome, while the later ones were highly coloured and fuller in the statement and realization of detail, he took it for granted that these changes marked the true line of progress and development in the art. The early “stained” drawings of Scott and Rooker were treated as the primitive and undeveloped models from which the later and more elaborate works of Turner, Copley Fielding, Sidney Cooper, John F. Lewis, Louis Haghe, and Carl Werner were developed. Every fresh complication of technique and elaboration of effect were hailed enthusiastically as signs of “progress,” and brilliance of colour, richness of effect, and fullness of realization were treated as the marks of “the full perfection” of which the art was capable. In this way water-colour “drawing” became “elevated” into the “perfected” art ofpainting in water-colours, and the beneficent cosmic process triumphantly produced paintings in water-colour which could actually “hold their own” in force and brilliancy of effect with oil paintings.