British Watercolours explores the many ways in which British artists have employed this versatile medium.

William Blake, John Constable, and Joseph Mallord William Turner are among the ten British watercolorists whose works are analyzed and reproduced in color and black and white.

From the landscapes of Constable to the imagery of Blake and Bacon, this book, published to accompany a major exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, is a lavish survey of British art from 1750 to 1950. Spanning two hundred years, British Vision presents some of the most iconic works in British art history from major public and private collections in Europe and the USA.William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, George Stubbs,William Blake, John Constable, Joseph Mallord William Turner, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Stanley Spencer, Graham Sutherland, Henry Fuseli, Richard Dadd, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud are mong the many outstanding artists whose work appears on the books pages. Essays by a raft of distinguished art historians focus on the two defining characteristics of British art: observation and imagination. This lavishly illustrated catalogue is a sumptuous record of the most comprehensive exhibition of British art to be staged under one roof in recent years, and represents a unique opportunity to discover the creative forces that shaped British art over two centuries.

"The revolution in watercolours of the later eighteenth century and its Victorian aftermath is acknowledged to be one of the greatest triumphs of British art. Its effect was to transform the modest tinted drawing of the topographer into a powerful and highly flexible means of expression for some of the Romantic era's greatest artists, among them Thomas Girtin, J.M.W. Turner and John Constable. The painters of the next generation were no less ambitious, and the range of subject-matter and technical inventiveness that was sustained for much of the Victorian period was to set a standard in watercolour painting that was without equal abroad." "In this magnificently illustrated survey of the great age of British watercolours, Andrew Wilton and Anne Lyles trace the development of attitudes to landscape and to the human figure in the landscape from 1750 to 1880. They show how once the traditional pen and ink drawing and its augmented washes of colour had been abandoned in order to paint directly in watercolours without pen outlines, the way was open for the powerful Romantic landscapes of the following decade and beyond, many of which were painted in the wild mountainous regions of Wales and Scotland." "During the nineteenth century, as the gilt-framed exhibition watercolour began to challenge the long-established oil painting in terms of size and in brilliance of colour and effect, the range of subject-matter was broadened to include scenes of country and town life from every part of Britain and, increasingly, from the Continent too. By mid-century the Near East was attracting many of the greatest Victorian watercolourists, including J. E. Lewis, David Roberts and Edward Lear. Other leading Victorians who regularly worked in watercolour include the Pre-Raphaelite painters John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, and the American-born James McNeill Whistler, all of whom are included in this book."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Epic Landscapes is the first study devoted to architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s substantial artistic oeuvre from 1795, when he set sail from Britain to Virginia, to late 1798, when he relocated to Pennsylvania. Thus, this book offers the only extended consideration of Latrobe’s Virginian watercolors, including a series of complex trompe l’oeil studies and three significant illustrated manuscripts. Though Latrobe’s architecture is well known, his watercolors have received little critical attention. Epic Landscapes rediscovers Latrobe’s watercolors as an ambitious body of work and reconsiders the close relationship between the visual and spatial sensibility of these images and his architectural designs. It also offers a fresh analysis of Latrobe within the context of creative practice in the Atlantic world at the end of the eighteenth century as he explored contemporary ideas concerning the form of art for Republican society and the social impacts of revolution. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

A fresh perspective on British landscape drawing in the Victorian and Modern eras. The attempts by artists of the Victorian and early Modern period to convey not merely the physical properties of a landscape but also its emotional and spiritual impact - landscape as 'places of the mind', as the critic Geoffrey Grigson put it - is the focus of this fascinating new study of British watercolours produced between 1850 and 1950. Drawing on the British Museum's impressive collection, this book explores artists' spiritual quests to capture the essence of landscape and convey a sense of place. Artists of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drew on earlier traditions but developed and extended the genre through their imaginative, personal responses to the artistic, cultural and social upheavals of the time. The book includes works by Victorian artists Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Poynter and by many well known twentieth-century artists, such as John and Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore, some of which have never previously been published.