Golden Age of Watercolours - Hardcover

Since its creation in the early years of the twentieth century, Sir Hickman Bacon's collection of British landscape drawings and watercolors has been recognized as the best private holding of such works anywhere in the world. Sir Hickman Bacon had advanced tastes for his time, favoring the late, ethereal Turner watercolors that became widely popular only with the advent of abstract painting in the 1940s and 1950s. Turner's friend Thomas Girton, one of the first artists to exploit watercolor as a medium in its own right, is also prominently represented, demonstrating the visual, spatial, emotional, and technical breadth of his landscape art. One of the glories of the collection is its group of watercolors by another of Turner's contemporaries, John Sell Cotman. Sir Hickman Bacon began collecting these works, astonishing in their apparent modernity, long before the First World War, when the artist's reputation was only just beginning to emerge from total obscurity; his work really began to become popular only in the 1920s. Other nineteenth-century watercolors, by both English and French artists, anticipate Impressionism in their growing freedom of expression. This, the first English-language publication on the collection, offers a critical text and full-color reproductions of these important and little-known works.