The Golden City: Rome from the Janiculum 1873
©
All rights reserved
Samuel Palmer 2011 Australia
watercolour and gouache with pencil, black chalk and gum arabic
51.4 x 71.0 cm (sheet)
Lister 668, Lister 668
Presented by members of the Varley Family, 1927
British Watercolours 1760–1900 The Age of Splendour
NGV International
Friday 14 October 2011 to Sunday 19 February 2012
This exhibition, drawn entirely from the NGV Collection, traces the revolution in British watercolours from the late eighteenth century to the end of the Victorian era. In this period the delicate, tinted drawing of the topographical draughtsman was transformed into a powerful and expressive art form by some of the Romantic and Victorian era’s greatest artists.
Watercolour was pivotal to the changing attitudes to landscape at this time and witnessed a shift in emphasis from the recording of the observed world to the expression of the artist’s personal response to nature. The exhibition also reveals the increased ambition of watercolourists in the later 19th century whose ’exhibition watercolours‘ competed with oil paintings in terms of size, brilliance of colour and effect and range of subject matter.
The exhibition presents major works from the Gallery’s collection that exemplify these developments by artists including Paul Sandby, Thomas Gainsborough, John Robert Cozens, J.M.W. Turner, Thomas Girtin, John Sell Cotman, David Cox, Peter de Wint, William Blake, Richard Parkes Bonington, Samuel Palmer, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones and Edward Lear, amongst others.
The Red Rigi 1842
© All rights reserved J. M. W. Turner 2011 Australia
watercolour, wash and gouache with some scratching out 30.5 x 45.8 cm (sheet) Wilton 1525, Wilton 1525 Felton Bequest, 1947
© All rights reserved J. M. W. Turner 2011 Australia
watercolour, wash and gouache with some scratching out 30.5 x 45.8 cm (sheet) Wilton 1525, Wilton 1525 Felton Bequest, 1947
