BRITISH DRAWINGS AND WATERCOLOURS FROM ROWLANDSON TO RILEY

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.