Splendid vision of Britain's masters of watercolour

THE National Gallery of Victoria's exhibition of watercolours examines the point when British painting re-entered art history.

THE feeling for nature reached a low ebb at about the end of the 17th century and the early 18th, with the triumph of the French formal garden, although of course it never died out.

Landscapes were still being painted by the Dutch and by the Roman heirs to the classical landscape tradition; in restoration France Watteau set his fetes galantes in dreamy imaginary landscapes derived from the Flemish tradition.

But there was nonetheless an important change of sensibility in about the middle of the 18th century. It runs parallel to the rise of neoclassicism among artists tired of rococo - reasserting, in the process, the central place of Rome in artistic training - and represents a similar reaction against the hegemony of French fashions and courtly affectations.

Rousseau, who always proudly recalled that he was a citizen of Geneva, not a Frenchman, led the attack with his declaration that man in the state of nature was more virtuous than civilised man (1750); Thomas Gray reflected on the existence of simple people attuned to the rhythms of the natural world in his enormously successful poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751); Burke wrote about the powerful but terrifying attraction of the sublime (1757), which became one of the great ideas of the romantic movement.

Britain, also the model of an open and tolerant society for a new generation of Enlightenment intellectuals and acknowledged as such in Voltaire's Lettres anglaises (1734), was indeed a notable leader in the development of this new sensibility. The artfully arranged but apparently unmanicured British garden - "nature to advantage dressed", in Pope's words - became fashionable all across Europe and even in France.

Gainsborough's famous portrait Mr and Mrs Andrews (1748-49), for all its artifice, is an engaging image of the British enjoyment of the countryside. Rousseau's rather abstract idea of nature is assimilated to a real and effective intimacy with the environment in Joseph Wright of Derby's memorable picture, in the Tate Gallery, of Sir Brooke Boothby reclining on the bank of a stream, meditating on a volume by the philosopher; the picture is like a more light-hearted and angst-free anticipation of the posthumous Les Reveries d'un promeneur solitaire (1782).

This was in fact Britain's moment, the point at which, after the devastation caused by puritan iconoclasm in the 17th century, British painting re-enters art history, producing important figures such as Hogarth, Gainsborough, Reynolds and then eventually Constable and Turner, and making its mark above all in the genre of landscape. And this is what makes the National Gallery of Victoria's survey of British watercolours between 1760 and 1900, The Age of Splendour, so significant.

This fascinating exhibition, for which there will be a book next year, but for which a helpful illustrated checklist is already available on the gallery's website, deals almost entirely with the British engagement with nature from the mid-18th century on. This happens to be coincidentally the period when plein-air oil sketches became popular, initially as studies for finished studio paintings, but eventually leading to the plein-air painting of finished exhibition pictures.

Watercolour was a very British medium, but its popularity is not simply a sign that the British were insular or behind the times. For one thing, the practice of plein-air oil sketching was, odd as it may seem, almost confined to Rome and its environs in the later 18th century; it was something carried out at the many famous painting sites in the city, often in the company of other painters and art students. Such sketching was in effect part of the special art culture of Rome, which only later was brought back to the northern countries.

In addition, watercolour is easier and lighter to carry around in a kit, easier to set up and put away after work, all considerations that made it more suitable for longer journeys, for voyages of exploration, and as something that can simply be carried around without great inconvenience on the off chance of finding something interesting to draw, as distinct from going on an excursion to a spot that you know in advance to be interesting.

Finally, outdoor oil sketching was most useful as a preparation for oil paintings, and oil painting was a professional practice, confined to a relatively small number of specialists. Watercolour concerned not only professionals but also a great many amateur and semi-amateur artists; as we saw in a recent column, however, the distinction was not as simple as we may think, when thousands of amateurs once had skills that most supposed professionals now lack.

Two such amateurs are prominent in the present exhibition. One is George Beaumont, baronet, art collector, patron of the arts, friend of Constable and one of the men who helped to found the National Gallery in London. Beaumont also owned the beautiful Lorrain Landscape with Hagar and the Angel (1646), which he used to take with him on his travels.

The two drawings by Beaumont not only demonstrate his skill but his easy mastery of different subgenres within landscape. The earlier of the two is a topographical view of a mountain range in Westmorland (1781): the forms are, as so often in other works, lightly delineated in pencil, and then shadow and tone are sparingly applied with washes. The other work, entirely different and presumably imaginary, is described only as a romantic landscape (circa 1800), and here the emphasis is all on mood, established through much stronger use of ink and wash, creating a dramatic chiaroscuro.

Beaumont was taught art at Eton by Alexander Cozens, famous for his theory of deriving landscapes from blots, which he eventually published as A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape, with illustrations, in 1785-86. His son, John Robert Cozens, who was greatly admired by Constable, is represented by one impressive and very atmospheric drawing of a goatherd on a woodland track near Lake Albano (1778).

The powerful sense of tone recalls the wash drawings of Lorrain - the profiled figures are almost uncannily Claudian - while the general mood, as the label correctly points out, is Virgilian, recalling the Eclogues in particular. Cozens suffered a nervous breakdown and was looked after by Thomas Monro (also physician to George III), who recognised his gifts and bought his work. Monro, the second of the gifted amateurs I mentioned, is represented here by what seems to be another imaginary landscape, recalling the elder Cozens's theory of generating landscapes from random marks: the work is done in an unusual medium, using a dried stick of India ink on dampened paper.

Monro was the patron of younger artists such as Girtin and Turner, whom he invited to study the works in his collection: his house came to be known as Dr Monro's Academy. There the younger artists were able to ponder Cozens's images and assimilate his conception of tone. The result can be seen in a beautiful early drawing by Turner, of Linlithgow Castle (c 1801), and Turner's subsequent evolution can be measured in another picture 25 years later, Okehampton Castle (c 1826), in which some of the tonal architecture of the composition can still be discerned, although it has all been translated into a new language of colour.

The relation of monochrome to colour is an interesting one in the history of art (especially prominent in Chinese art and art theory). Here it seems the more abstract monochrome media of ink and tonal wash are inevitably associated with the classical tradition of Claude, while the use of the full chromatic range of watercolour is rather more vernacular and can at times descend to the anecdotal. One can see the distinction already in a pair of works by Francis Towne. One, of Lake Torfi, near Lugano (1781), is executed, as befits an Italian subject, in washes of brown and black ink; the other, of a cascade in Westmorland (1786), is in a correspondingly more literal and English idiom and in colour.

One artist within this movement who is of particular interest to Australian art history is John Glover, a prominent watercolour painter in Britain before his move to Tasmania to join his sons in 1831. Glover is represented by a fine landscape drawing of the 1820s and another of Vallombrosa in Tuscany. But the most beautiful things by him are two remarkable sketchbooks from the early years of the century.

One is open at a pair of horizontal views of Lake Windermere, made during the artist's visit to the Lake District in 1805. They are masterful drawings, almost breathtaking, although so small, in which the outline of the motif has been executed in very fine pencil as guidelines for the delicate layers of ink and wash that are then built up to model the forms of the topography and evoke the sense of light and depth. What is particularly exquisite about these drawings is the way they seem to be executed with the brush, which contributes to an unexpectedly illusionistic tonal effect, even as we recognise that the subject has been analysed into a tonal pattern. The apparent absence of penwork, which inevitably makes us conscious of the hand of the artist, contributes to an impersonal quality that in some ways anticipates the invention of the photograph - which mechanically converts colour into tonal values - decades later.

The second of the two sketchbooks includes two unfinished drawings that, though beautiful in themselves, also tell us a lot about his process. One is outlined in pencil only, and shows just how precisely and finely this stage of the work was executed; it was not intended to be conspicuous in the final result. The second drawing has been half-executed in wash, starting from the background, as was the practice in painting too, and no doubt this helps to explain the control Glover is able to maintain in managing extremely complex transitions of light and dark from the back to the front of his composition.

There are many other drawings in this exhibition that reward close attention, but there is also a serious decline of inspiration towards the end of the period covered. Part of the problem arises from the very achievements of Girtin and Turner and some others, who sought to expand the painterly range of the medium.

Up to a certain point this expansion could yield beautiful and surprising results, but it could also go too far, as we see in Thomas Richardson's Corie Echen, Highlands of Scotland (1880). Distracted by the attempt to equal the chromatic richness of oil painting, he achieves instead an effect that is at once congested and insubstantial.

Misplaced ambition ends up undermining the integrity of the watercolour medium which, like all media, draws strength from its very limitations. 

British Watercolours 1760-1900: The Age of Splendour, NGV International, Melbourne, until February 19.