- Lecture
The Garden Court (detail), c. 1869/73. Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones (British, 1833–1898). Graphite and watercolor, heightened with white gouache; 32.3 x 60.2 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund 1994.197
'Poetry of the Earth': The Golden Age of British Watercolors
About The Event
Heather Lemonedes
Watercolor has always been considered a particularly British phenomenon. The availability of commercially made “paint-cakes” combined with easy portability made it the ideal medium for landscape painting. Recognizing watercolor’s potential for translucence and brilliance, artists in Britain captured the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere as had never been done in oil on canvas. This lecture will explore the evolution of watercolor painting from John Robert Cozens’s “tinted drawings” of the last quarter of the 18th century, to J. M. W. Turner’s diaphanous seascapes painted at the height of the Victorian era, considered the pinnacle of achievement in the medium.