AGNSW’s Victoria Watercolours delivers real-world views
The Victoria Watercolours exhibition says much about British art in the 19th century.
After some years of going nowhere, the project to expand Sydney’s Art Gallery of NSW has finally been granted funding by the NSW government. But the plans are significantly different from the oversized design lampooned by Paul Keating in 2015 as “a gigantic spoof”, a “megaplex” intended for events and conferences and lacking any “contained gallery spaces”.
In the end, a way forward seems to have been found by the gallery’s chairman, the ubiquitous and capable David Gonski, in consultation with Keating himself. The modified design is much smaller, no longer abuts the original building or sprawls across the land bridge over the Cahill Expressway, but sits on the other side of the road and over disused World War II oil tanks that will be incorporated into the exhibition spaces.
In the artists’ impressions that have been released, the oil tank gallery looks much more suggestive than the glass boxes proposed above ground. It recalls David Walsh’s Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, easily the most celebrated new museum building in Australia for many years, and entirely built underground: this was a bold choice at the time, but it is inherent to the ethos of the museum and has proved one of its greatest attractions for visitors.
The cafe at MONA is rightly sited above to take advantage of the magnificent views of water and mountains all around. But exhibition galleries are not viewing platforms; not places to look outward but inward. They should help us focus our attention on the objects displayed, encouraging us to adjust to the scale, the mood and even the tempo of particular works.
As it happens, Peter Raissis’s exhibition of Victorian watercolours provides an object lesson in such principles of exhibition design, and fortuitously at the AGNSW itself. Two large galleries in the so-called Old Courts, the ones usually devoted to the display of European art before 1800, have been repainted in a deep crimson, which is far more sympathetic to the spirit of the architecture as well as to the period of the works displayed than their previous neutral off-white.
At one end is the small room containing some of the most precious of the early paintings, including works by Rubens and Claude Lorrain; at the other, enormous velvet curtains drawn back in swags open on to the gallery’s collection of late neoclassical and Victorian marble statues of mythological figures. There is a theatrical quality to this curtain that makes the design artfully neo-traditional and thus oddly more contemporary than the modernist blandness of the galleries next door.
The exhibition is devoted to watercolours produced in England in the 19th century, including a number from the Georgian period before the beginning of Queen Victoria’s long reign (1837-1901). It is an absorbing collection that says much about British art in the 19th century, not only in its subject matter but in its choice of medium and in the uses to which that medium is put.
All paints are a mixture of pigments with some kind of liquid binder that makes it possible to apply them, but then dries to leave a durable image. In the case of watercolour, pigments are essentially mixed with glue and can be diluted with water for application on an absorbent surface such as paper. Water readily evaporates, leaving the dry image behind. Watercolour is transparent, but the addition of chalk turns it into the opaque version known as gouache.
The nature of the medium entails an aesthetic and a process very different from those of oil paint. Oil paint tends to be applied from dark to light, the darkest layers being thin and flat, while the lighter ones, applied over the darks, are thicker. There is no impasto in watercolour, in which all the colours are thin and flat on the page, and the painter works from light to dark, leaving the lightest areas as white paper and building darker tones all around these.
The equipment required for watercolour painting is also much more portable than that needed for oil painting: a pocket-sized watercolour set, some brushes, a small bottle of water, and a watercolour sketchbook. This makes it an ideal medium for hikers and nature lovers, or for travellers wanting to record the sights they encounter in foreign lands. So watercolour was quintessentially the medium of travel, exploration and the plein-air recording of the world.
As an extension of drawing, watercolour was also a natural part of a school curriculum; delicate and highly refined, but not requiring the long and specialised studio training of the expert oil painter. It was also useful to anyone, from architects and engineers to natural historians and naval officers, whose work demanded an ability to draw. So watercolour was a medium without clear boundaries between amateur and professional, or between high art and applied art, but rather a continuum between these categories. Many outstanding watercolourists also have exercised other professions.
In all these respects — in the embrace of utilitarian applications, the openness to amateur practitioners, the love of nature and curiosity about the world and new lands — watercolour was a very British medium. Other artists of other nations had practised it before the British adopted it so enthusiastically: Albrecht Duerer, for example, had been an astonishing pioneer of the medium in the 16th century. But nowhere was it so keenly taken up by such a broad range of practitioners.
Perhaps this is what led British watercolour, especially in the period covered by this exhibition, to attempt more than might seem the natural range of the art form. A medium that is best suited to light, fresh, lively notations of the phenomenal world was thus made to attempt heavier, more substantial effects to rival those of oil painting: it is as though we are witnessing not merely the aspiration of watercolourists to equal oil painters but the implicit assertion that British artists, with their watercolour medium and their semi-amateur ethos, are capable of outdoing the continentals with a medium that required years of professional training.
Three works that happen to hang side-by-side epitomise some of the diverse ambitions of the British tradition. The latest of the three, a view of Richmond in Yorkshire by William Callow, although painted in 1858, remains faithful to the original spirit of mid-18th century plein-air watercolour: it is a view of a real place, capturing delicate impressions of light and atmosphere, working in transparent watercolour and leaving considerable areas of the paper unpainted or barely tinted.
Made three years earlier, Samuel Palmer’s Watermill (1855) is very different. Although it may represent a real place, and despite the artist’s efforts to work in a more normal idiom than the visionary and dreamlike landscapes for which he is famous, Palmer can’t help allowing perspective to bend and twist to follow his sense of the organic, expressive movement of natural and human life.
Hanging between these two, Finch’s Classical Landscape (1826) forms a striking contrast with both. Compared with Callow, its painterly texture is much denser, emulating the richness of oil paint in its colour saturation and above all in its deep chiaroscuro — watercolour is more naturally composed of veils of colour than of deep shadows.
Set against Palmer, its stability and settledness are striking. Palmer has no clear sense of verticals or horizontals: forms swim up and down, the ground level varies across the composition, in a way that speaks of a subjective and emotional view of the world. Finch’s composition, on the other hand, is anchored in a powerful sense of the horizontal and the vertical — the axes that compose the matrix of the picture plane — essentially learned from studying the landscapes of Nicolas Poussin.
These images that venture into the poetic, or the more abstract construction of the classical landscape, may seem to depart from the inherent spirit of watercolour. And works that emulate the colour saturation and tonal effects of oil paint certainly raise problems: the best art usually arises from a deep attunement to the specific qualities of material and practice.
Other works depart even further from what we may see as the mission and scope of watercolour. There are enormous landscapes and elaborate views of historical events, where watercolour often seems out of its depth, but whose real purpose was to produce designs for reproduction in the new media of black and white or coloured lithography.
Similarly, because watercolour is so good at documenting the observed world, it was employed to represent the exotic sights of the new colonial empires. But here it often falls victim to the Victorian love of literal truth and factual, journalistic recording, in an overload of incidental detail at the expense of a more poetic grasp of mood. A medium that is perfectly adapted to the freshness of a study is forced into finished, and often over-finished images.
Watercolour is similarly used to document social phenomena, or to reflect on moral and political issues, as in George Pinwell’s striking picture of urban alienation, A Seat in St James’s Park, whose main figures, as Tom Roberts perceptively observed, are all suffering alone in their own thoughts.
Altogether it is the earnestness of Victorian art — the quality Oscar Wilde so elegantly dissected in his most famous comedy — that hampers many of these artists. They are trying too hard, whether to rival oil painting or to express moral and religious values. We know too well about artists trying too hard and preaching their views to us today; but good art arises from a more disinterested concern with truth.
For all these reservations, necessary as they are to explain how Victorian watercolours diverge from the lighter and more spontaneous quality of earlier generations, the exhibition is full of individually interesting and even delightful works by Turner, Glover, Mole and many others that repay close study.
Thus Andrew Nicholl’s study of flowers, the work chosen for the cover of the catalogue, may look at first sight like a work of botanical inspiration, yet the distant view of an emigration port — cited in the title — suggests it alludes to the nostalgia of those leaving Britain for a new home. Meanwhile Jules Trayer’s Breton Peasant Girl (c. 1870s) is not just a charming interior but an early example of the influence of a newly rediscovered master of oil painting: Jan Vermeer, whose catalogue raisonne was published by Theophile Thore-Burger in 1866.
Victorian Watercolours
Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney. Until December 3
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