7 wonders of the watercolor world. To celebrate the vitality of watercolor and its impact on the art world, we went to seven American and British museums. We asked curators to select a single significant watercolor from their collections. Although his choices represent only a small sample of existing watercolor masterpieces, these paintings encapsulate the medium’s evolution throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Later artists have embraced what was initially an exclusively ideal and topographical medium and taken it to ever more experimental and expressive heights.
The wonder of the world watercolor #1
The first of the miracles of the watercolor society, seven vivid birds perch with outstretched flanks, head bobbing, and chirping beaks. The only parrot variety belonging to the United States, the Carolina parakeet went extinct less than years after John portrayed it. Roberta J.M. Olson, the curator of easy landscape drawing at the New-York Historical Society, says Audubon’s brilliant depiction better preserves the liveliness of the varieties. Audubon made this vibrant watercolor for The Birds of America, a work that changed the ornithological design.
No one before him had portrayed life-size birds, in action, surrounded by their natural habitat. Working over a 19-year period to represent all species of birds in America, Audubon created 435 watercolors, all housed in the New-York Historical Society collection. The watercolors were issued as hand-colored lithographs. In the method, the writer developed innovative watercolor designs. According to Audubon has pioneered new techniques for modeling, collage, and mixing media, including metallic pigments, and he is considered America’s first great watercolorist.
The wonder of the world watercolor #2
A person portrayed the austere rooms of the ancient Basilica of Saint Ambrose in Milan with the colors of the earth. He carefully depicted the architecture rising in perspective, outlining the arches and pillars while allowing the watercolor to flow more freely, portraying the aged stone surfaces. Bonington combined watercolor with body color and gummy paint in the darker regions to produce subtle changes between light and dark. Acting Curator of the Wallace Collection, Paintings, Watercolors, Miniatures, and Manuscripts. Bursts of light enliven the image, as in the grid in the center and through the distant chorus. Although the work is a mostly accurate portrait of the cathedral, Bonington took some liberties by exaggerating the Gothic features, which must have particularly appealed to him.
Bonington often drew on the site in oil and reworked his subjects into watercolors completed later in his studio. Secondo Packer, Milan: The interior of Sant’Ambrogio was influential in the recent development and reattribution of an oil sketch in the selection of the Kimbell Art Museum in Texas. A careful comparison between Wallace’s watercolor and Kimbell’s oil sketch resulted in their close association. Bonington remained relatively faithful to his and altered the position of some of the figures from the left-hand side to the right-hand side of the basilica.
The wonder of the world watercolor #3
This turbulent watercolor depicts J.M.W. Turner’s fascination with the sublime: nature at its most fierce, terrifying, and majestic. Bottom right, a small carriage made up of a few strokes of reddish pigment provides a scale for the overwhelming scene. Rugged mountains loom over the traveler as the water crashes into the narrow passage. According to John Marciari, Charles W. Engelhard Curator of Morgan Library & Museum and Head of Department, Drawings, and Pictures, in 1842, Turner soared the Gotthard Pass and witnessed the Ticino River in its springtime torrent, when the snow melted, it swelled the river.
When Turner reverted to England to represent the view, he criticized John Ruskin, one of Turner’s greatest champions. Ruskin quickly commissioned this finished watercolor from Turner, stating that it was the most outstanding work he created in the current period of his art. In The Way at St. Gotthard, Near Faido, Turner hired the brilliant ways that gave him the various famous British watercolorist of the 19th century. Describing watercolor: Turner’s style is as extraordinary as his vision, outlining the mountains with layers of watercolor, scraping off layers of paint and paper, and then adding additional layers of color and gouache while transmitting light, fog, and water spilled from the pass. Turner even left fingerprints of him while he mixed and dried the wet blue paint in the foreground.
The wonder of the world watercolor #4
Barefoot, with rolled-up trousers and a straw hat, a boy sits on a large anchor, facing the viewer. The sandy beach is dotted with round, smooth stones and clouds that form on the horizon. Early in his career, Winslow Homer had used watercolors in engraved drawings and preparatory sketches for oil paintings. Still, it was not until 1873 that he made his first watercolors for the exhibition. He spent the summer in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he was inspired to draw and paint children playing on the beaches and around the pier. This first Winslow Homer watercolor stands out for its dramatic clarity of design and robust and concise application of pigment, curator of prints and drawings at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
First drawn in pencil and first executed with some colors. In postwar art, children were seen not only as harbingers of a new era but also as symbols of the lost innocence of the nation. Homer’s Gloucester watercolors share this background. In this watercolor, the anchor, a child, sits on symbolizes security and stability. It is also configured as a pointer, like an arrow that directs the viewer’s gaze towards the sea, where one day the child will be forced to earn a living.
The wonder of the watercolor world #5
A disheveled African American man sits on a chair in a dark room. Light filters through a window, accentuating facial features and wrinkled knuckles. His shirt peeks out from under a ripped jacket, injecting some blue into the earthy palette. Willard Snowden has done odd jobs in Andrew Wyeth’s studio and has become a frequent role model for the artist. According to Audrey Lewis, curator at the Brandywine River Art Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, Wyeth’s hometown, the watercolor’s title refers to Snowden’s communicative nature as he poses.
Lewis says: Surrounded by the emptiness in the large, sterile room outside Wyeth’s studio, he appears to be giving a great speech to an invisible audience. Wyeth created this portrait using the dry brush, a technique that allowed for a deliberate approach. I dry brush when my emotions get deep enough on a topic. I shade with a shorter brush, slide it into the paint, spread the brush and bristles, squeeze out a good amount of moisture, and color with my fingers so that only a tiny amount of paint remains.
The wonder of the watercolor world #6
The stark scenery and big sky that covered the small Texas town caused the young art instructor. She painted Evening Star No. VII towards the end of a sequence of eight abstract landscapes, each of which responded differently but did not reproduce the above composition, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum curator ff and. It is one of 51 watercolors created by the artist while teaching at Canyon. It is significant because it expresses her early passion for abstraction.
The wonder of the watercolor world #7
Samuel Palmer, one of the leading British landscape painters of the Romantic period, was commissioned in his old age to create a series of large watercolors inspired by the poetry of John Milton. In The Lonely Tower, Palmer depicted a bright and changing nightscape. Two shepherds rest as the crescent moon illuminates the woolly backs of their sheep. A white owl flies out of the darkness over a bottomless abyss. Nearby, an ox cart crosses a road over a stone wall. On a rocky cliff in the distance, against the twilight sky, he comes across single window lit by a presumably equally lonely inhabitant.
The watercolor captures the gloomy atmosphere of poetry, a hallmark of romanticism. Palmer uses a combination of matte gouache and transparent watercolor to convey a mood of peaceful contemplation through rich, velvety shadows and warm lighting. Associate Curator of British Art at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. With delicate and controlled brushstrokes, the artist contrasts the cold white light of the stars with the yellow glow of the moon and the red and orange fires that burn in the tower window and the lantern of the car.