Coming at last to our text, Water-Colors—the art of depicting nature on a sheet of white paper by paints diluted with water—it will be well to remind you that the art goes back to almost prehistoric times. A few weeks ago, in the library of Mr. Jesse Carter, director of the American Academy in Rome, I saw one of the earliest water-colors in existence. It was painted upon a sheet of slate, and, although some thousands of years old, still retained its color and remarkable brilliancy. The subject was a group of figures, the centre object being a girl of wonderful grace.
The present art of water-color painting, with a sheet of white paper as background instead of the permanent stone, is, however, but little more than one hundred and fifty years old, and owes its existence largely to the men of the English school.
Mr. C. E. Hughes, in his delightful book on "Early English Water Color," confined this English school to the men born between the years 1720 and 1820.
In this group he places the great Gainsborough, who from 1760 to 1774 worked "in charcoal and water-color on tinted paper," which he said he "loved to dash off of an evening, and which dazzled the fine ladies and gentlemen who frequented the select watering-place of Bath," where he was then living.
Then came Robert Cozens, the brothers Sanby, Thomas Hearne, Thomas Malton, Samuel Scott, and a few others, all known as the eighteenth-century painters.
These were succeeded by Thomas Girtin, who was born in 1775 and died at twenty-seven years of age; and the great J. M. W. Turner, who first saw the light in the same year, and on the day on which all great Englishmen should be born—namely, April 23—a day dedicated to St. George and the birthday of William Shakespeare.
Girtin and Turner worked together. Girtin, measured by the standard of to-day, was an extreme impressionist, leaving behind him sketches dashed in with an appearance of freedom which Peter DeWint and David Cox might have envied when in after years they were at the height of their power. Turner, on the contrary, devoted his time to acquiring that triumphant grasp of detail which caused him to be known in his earlier life as an extreme realist.
The change in Turner's work—the broader brush—came in his later years when oil became his medium of expression, in which, no doubt, his ability to note and yet sacrifice all unnecessary detail was a potent factor.
A list of Englishmen greatly prized in their day now follows. Such men as John Varly, Gilpin, Glover, William Havell (all of whom during some part of their careers were members of the first Water Color Society formed in England, in 1804, which body still survives in the old Water Color Society whose rooms are still open on Pall Mall East) rose into prominence, their works finding places both in private and public collections.
This society was in turn succeeded by the New Society of Painters in Miniature and Water Colors, which came into being in 1807 and went out of existence in 1812—a victim, says Hughes, of the condition of public apathy which brought about in the same year a reconstruction of the older organization under the joint title of the Oil and Water Color Society, and which eked out a precarious existence until the birth of the association now known as the Royal Institute for Painters in Water Colors.