Picturing the past
Huon Mallalieu applauds a bold initiative to create a visual history of the world through documentary watercolours
Huon Mallalieu applauds a bold initiative to create a history of the world through watercolours
INTRODUCING an exhibition of topographical watercolours at the British Library in 1987, the curator Ann Payne wrote: ‘If the camera had been invented by the Venerable Bede in the year 700, few of the pictures in this exhibition would have been made. The soldiers, antiquaries and travellers whose works are shown would have carried cameras in their packs rather than sketchbooks and paints.’
This was welcome recognition for a medium that has sometimes been regarded as the poor relation of high-born oil paint, attracting such pats on the head as Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘A little amateur painting in watercolour betokens the innocent and the quiet mind’. Topography has even been looked down on by leading watercolour artists themselves, including David Cox, who said his own landscapes in oils were ‘the work of the mind which I consider very far before portraits of places’.
Although public and private collections in Britain and around the world contain thousands of watercolours that tell us a great deal about the appearance of the world before photography, these are sometimes difficult to access and often not fully catalogued.
Now, an extraordinarily ambitious project is to be launched in an attempt to change that. The Watercolour World follows the success of The Public Catalogue Foundation, the charitable project set up by Fred Hohler to catalogue more than 230,000 oil paintings in British public collections. ‘It was during this 10-year project that the obscurity into which our watercolour collection had fallen became increasingly apparent, with exhibitions of watercolours anywhere being generally thin in number and content,’ he says.
The subjects and artists of many watercolours in museums were unidentified, the majority unframed, some in poor condition and the museums lacked suitable galleries for their display. It seemed to Dr Hohler that a great asset was being wasted: ‘With virtually no perceived public interest in them, watercolours have become increasingly ignored, although it is hard to generate public interest in something the public doesn’t know exists and, even if it does know, in the main cannot see.’
‘Perceived’ is an important word here. When they are made available, watercolours often arouse considerable public affection and interest. In 2012, I organised ‘Home and Abroad’, an exhibition of landscape and figure drawings and watercolours from a Suffolk private collection, at Gainsborough’s House in Sudbury, and it became the second most visited exhibition ever held there. Almost all the exhibits dated from before 1800 and they were organised in a topographical progression from Suffolk and East Anglia, to London and the rest of Britain, and on to the coast, the Continent and the wider world.
The coming together of a number of developments in 18th-century Britain, particularly England, gave birth to a new way of observing and recording the world, although the origins of watercolour can be traced back to earlier times. The tradition of military surveyors making watercolour
views of ports and fortifications goes back to English and Flemish artists employed by Henry VIII and his successors.
Spies too. At least one Dutch draughtsman just happened to be on the North Kent coast a year or so before the Dutch navy burned Charles II’S fleet in the Medway in 1667. In the mid 18th century, as the first British Empire was coming into existence, wars being were fought with a new professionalism and military academies were established, beginning with the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich for the engineers and artillery, where officers were taught to draw as a vital military skill.
At the same time, the Enlightenment desire to understand the world through scientific enquiry was giving rise to new approaches to documenting past and present. Antiquarianism, the study of ancient remains, became closely allied to topography, the recording of the here and now. Watercolour, an art in which the English came to excel, was a perfect medium in which to capture the appearance of plants, people and things as well as places.
Watercolours were comparatively portable and had already proved their value in the 1580s, when John White took them to the first North American colony to record the flora, fauna and people of the New World.
White in Virginia and Wenceslaus Hollar in Tangier provide links between Henry VIII’S surveyors and the 18th-century topographers. In 1669, Hollar petitioned Charles II to allow him to accompany the mission to what was briefly an English possession and offered (for a fitting-out fee of £100) to ‘adventure my person and time, and give an account of what is worthy to be observed in those parts, especially the city of Tangier, for although there is a large map thereof done by me—but performed only upon tradition by word of mouth… I conceive if one should compare the print with the thing itself, as I intend doing if I go there… I would examine all, and take designs, and give his Majesty much better satisfaction.’
As an ability to draw was regarded as a gentlemanly attribute—and was recommended as less likely than oil to soil a gentleman’s elaborate clothing—good artists were appointed to teach it in public schools. Such
‘Watercolour, an art in which the English came to excel, was a perfect medium’
men sometimes also gave lessons to the families of their pupils and this was also true of drawing masters at the military academies. For officer cadets, however, this was no mere pastime, but an important adjunct to cartography in making reports and preparing campaigns.
Unfortunately, the origins of the Drawing Room of the Board of Ordnance at the Tower of London are obscure, partly because records were lost in a 19th-century
fire, but the organisation for training and deploying surveyors and engineers seems to have been established by the end of Marlborough’s wars at the beginning of the 18th century.
It was there that the brothers Thomas and Paul Sandby learned their trade and, from there, Paul went on, in 1768, to become the first drawing master at Woolwich, continuing to teach cadets there for three decades. He must have been an inspiring teacher,
as his clear, clean style was passed on in recorded scenes and depictions of campaigns across India and North America, as well as in Europe during the French Revolutionary War.
A description of Sandby’s course for Gentleman Cadets survives: ‘Putting Perspective in Practice by Copying from Drawings, which qualifies them for Drawing from nature; teaches them the effect of Light and Shade and makes them acquainted
also with Aerial Perspective. Then to proceed to take views about Woolwich and other places; which teaches them at the same time to break ground, and forms the eye to the knowledge of it.’
Similarly, naval officers were taught to survey coasts and to illustrate their logs. Between 1799 and 1801, the Admiralty employed the marine artist John Thomas Serres to provide an up-to-date survey of the French and Spanish coasts from Normandy to Gibraltar and his carefully annotated coastal panoramas were excellent navigational aids as well as works of art.
The Pacific voyages of Capt Cook and his French competitors carried artists as well as naturalists and other scientists and, elsewhere, professional artists followed British arms and commerce as they spread around the globe.
During the intervals of Continental peace in the 18th century, the growing fashion for Grand Tourism through France, the Alps and Germany to Italy, gave a further boost to view taking. The richest young ‘milordi’ travelled not only with a tutor and servants, but also a personal draughtsman. William Beckford was accompanied by John Robert Cozens; other patrons, such as Lord Warwick with John ‘Warwick’ Smith, paid for favourite artists to make their own tours.
Some artists—cozens again—stayed in Italy for several years, paying their way by mass-producing views of the most admired monuments, to be taken home like holiday snaps or postcards. William Daniell’s
A Voyage Round Great Britain (1814–25) would do the same for subjects close to home (even if they were sometimes rearranged for artistic effect).
Those who pushed on from Italy to Greece helped to change the direction of neo-classical architecture in Britain by introducing Greek as well as Roman motifs and the Daniells and others in India and on the China Coast promoted a taste for the exotic. Other artists who never ventured abroad themselves worked up drawings brought back by amateurs to feed the market for exotic locations.
A slightly younger generation of intrepid professional travellers, such as David Roberts and Edward Lear, inspired able
amateurs to follow in their footsteps to places such as Egypt and the Holy Land. William Simpson and other watercolourists even observed campaigns in the Crimea, India and Afghanistan.
The Watercolour World project aims to create a worldwide, geographically indexed online archive of documentary watercolours up to 1900—the date by which the camera had become the most important means of generating an eye-witness record. It includes topographical, anthropological and botanical images covering observed events, people, places, landscapes and seascapes.
As Dr Hohler sees it, the objective of the project is self-evident, as however interesting the watercolours are from an artistic point of view, their true importance is as informative records—the purpose for which they were originally made.
The value of such a resource has been demonstrated over the past few years by the series of reports on the British coastline undertaken by Prof Robin Mcinnes on behalf of the Crown Estate and Historic England, which have used watercolours among other historical records.
It is an immensely ambitious operation; public collections, particularly in Britain, are huge. There are 300,000 or so images at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, and the holdings in the British Museum, the British Library and probably the Royal Collection far exceed that.
Many regional museums and local libraries have hundreds, if not thousands and so, too, do institutions in Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne and Yale. Then there is the whole non English-speaking world. However, that may well not be the half of it. The intention is to collate private collections, including, obviously, those of descendants of 18thand 19th-century amateurs. This could take the total into the millions.
‘The Watercolour World aims to create a worldwide, indexed online archive’