A year before the English Civil War, Anthony van Dyck, principal painter to King Charles I, found himself by the coast in a quiet corner of rural England.
He recorded the scene before him in the form of a modest watercolour painted on an oblong piece of paper: a small copse, summer foliage dappled in sunshine, each tree casting its dark shadow on the ground; roofs and chimneys of a small village, just visible behind the trees; the masts of a flotilla of tall ships, silhouetted against the sky in the middle distance, each tip-tilted by the heave and dance of the sea.
The artist painted the moment, but he also painted the moment of its passing away: to the right, he allowed the objects to drift into incompletion, ships’ masts turning into ghostly traceries of uncoloured line; land and sea melting into the whiteness of untouched paper.
Van Dyck’s A Coastal Landscape with Trees and Ships has been hung at the very start of 'Watercolour#, Tate Britain’s eclectic new exhibition. It is a surprisingly early example of the landscape watercolour and has been chosen, presumably, because it demonstrates the key strength of the medium – its ability to catch an experience while simultaneously suggesting the evanescence of human life.
'Watercolour' demonstrates the full breadth of uses to which the watercolour has been put. It includes early examples of the map-maker’s and military cartographer’s art, as well as a handful of medieval illuminated manuscripts and Elizabethan miniatures – all of which, technically at least, might be described as forms of watercolour.
It also includes an entire section dedicated to the role of the watercolour during the age of exploration. Its pigment cakes’ portability meant that explorers like Captain Cook would take watercolourists with them to ensure that whatever they encountered could be recorded. The botanical watercolours of Sydney Parkinson and the zoological studies of Edward Lear are early expressions of the impulse to study, preserve and pass on experiences of nature.
Also thanks to its portability, watercolour remains the medium through which it’s possible to trace most clearly the evolution of tourism. In the hands of its earliest great exponents – Girtin, Cotman, Towne, Cozens and above all Turner – the topographical watercolour awoke a generation to the pleasures of travel.
This is a compendious show but it also has a clear and militant agenda. Its ambition is to liberate the watercolour from the tyranny of a very particular misconception, one that can in fact be attributed to its very popularity as a medium of topographical record. With the rise of the amateur watercolour society in the 19th century, watercolour itself became damagingly associated with a certain kind of dilettantish aesthetic conservatism.
As hordes of upper and middle-class Englishmen (and women) took to the blue remembered hills, watercolour box in hand, they tainted the reputation of watercolour itself – made it seem the medium par excellence of a stale, staid, sterile pastoralist amateurism.
One of the ways Tate’s exhibition seeks to counter that is through the inclusion of modern avant-garde watercolours. The large-scale landscape and figurative fantasies of Edward Burra are especially impressive and affecting. An unexpected hero of the show, he stands suddenly confirmed by it as the most versatile English watercolourist of the 20th century.
It also includes a large-scale, performative watercolour by Andy Goldsworthy, Source of Scaur I, in which a grit-encrusted snowball has been allowed to melt on a sheet of monumental paper. The resulting image is a wake of reddish wash, redolent of nature but suggestive of human residue.
The exhibition closes, though, with a reminder that it was during the 19th century, and in the hands of J M W Turner himself, that the watercolour had been driven to its boldest extremes.
In a series of almost inchoate, but exquisitely decisive sketches, arranged across half a wall, the artist gently insists on the utter provisionality both of human experience and the matter from which it is formed. The world is reduced to nothing more than the pulse of light, the energies of the sea, the vortex of the everchanging cosmos.
In such images, the uncertain, provisional language of what might clumsily be termed “modern art” is born. As if to make the point, Turner’s “colour beginnings” are themselves surrounded by their post-Impressionist, post-Cubist, post-Expressionist, Gesturalist, Actionist and Conceptualist offspring. But nothing goes beyond them.
This review also appears in Seven magazine, free with The Sunday Telegraph