Published to accompany exhibition held at the Tate Gallery 10/9 - 30/11 1997.

The Whitworth Gallery, founded in 1889, holds one of the finest collections of British watercolours and drawings. This is the first book to publish this outstanding group of works in its entirety, and provides a fascinating insight into the collection. The collection is especially important because of the broad range of artists it encompasses. Holdings of Turner and Girtin are particularly significant, as are the works by Alexander and John Robert Cozens. While the main strength comes from the eighteenth century, there are also important nineteenth-century entries, including famous watercolours by Ford Madox Brown, Millais, Burne-Jones, Rossetti and Holman Hunt. Combining broad popular appeal with scholarly interest, this watercolour collection provides a source of enjoyment to the many collectors of English watercolours. The book begins with a brief introduction to the background of the collection, followed by each work presented alphabetically by artist. Each entry includes a short biography and description, followed by listings of other works. All 2,500 works are included, 2,000 of which are illustrated in black and white, and 32 in colour.

This title was first published in 2002: Draw ing on extensive primary research, Greg Smith describes the shifting cultural identities of the English watercolour, and the English watercolourist, at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. His convincing narrative of the conflicts and alliances that marked the history of the medium and its practitioners during this period includes careful detail about the broader artistic context within which watercolours were produced, acquired and discussed. Smith calls into question many of the received assumptions about the history of watercolour painting. His account exposes the unsatisfactory nature of the traditional narrative of watercolour painting’s development into a ’high’ art form, which has tended to offer a celebratory focus on the innovations and genius of individual practitioners such as Turner and Girtin, rather than detailing the anxieties and aspirations that characterized the ambivalent status of the watercolourist. The Emergence of the Professional Watercolourist is published with the assistance of the Paul Mellon Foundation.

Since 1756, the British Museum has acquired, by gift, bequest or purchase, some 90 works of portrait sculpture. Presented in a variety of media, most of the sitters are eminent statesmen, scholars and authors and many of the works are by sculptors of the first rank, yet the pieces have rarely been on public display and are correspondingly little known. The portraits have been closely studied and catalogued in this illustrated volume. For each piece, Aileen Dawson considers the gensis, material, place in the artist's oeuvre, and history in the museum.