This exhibition was selected by William Feaver, John Gage and Evelyn Joll, and first shown at the Edinburgh Festival in 1981. It subsequently travelled to China where the exhibition introduced British drawing and watercolour to a country where these arts had been established for well over a thousand years. This exhibition covered a period of roughly 200 years, from the beginnings of an independent watercolour art in Britain to the 1980s. The exhibition covered a variety of genres, from landscape that went from George Robeson in the soaring highlands of Scotland to John Middleton in the low, flat country of East Anglia in the South East of England. The exhibition sought to show how British artists found their surroundings to be a natural source of inspiration, from views gained whilst on the Grand Tour of Europe to the industrial slag heaps of industrial Britain. The exhibition comprised some 158 works by 104 artists and covered works dating from early 19th century to. The exhibition was accompanied by a bi-lingual (Chinese-English) catalogue with essays by John Gage and William Feaver, and notes on the artists by Andrea Rose, (No ISBN number). Works in the exhibition were drawn from national, regional and private collections, and from the British Council collection.

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Drawing

    The depiction of shapes and forms on a flat surface chiefly by means of lines although colour and shading may also be included. Materials most commonly used are pencil, ink, crayon, charcoal, chalk and pastel, although other materials, including paint, can be used in combination.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Watercolour

    A paint composed of water-soluble pigment, which has been ground in gum, usually gum Arabic. When made opaque with white, watercolour is generally called gouache. Colours are usually applied and spread with brushes and water, but other tools can also be used. Most watercolour painting is done on paper, but other absorbent grounds can also be employed. The term also denotes a work of art executed in this medium.