This is an illustrated survey of watercolour painting from 1750 to the present day, including the finest examples of work by Sandby, Cozens, Girtin, Turner, Rowlandson, Cotman, De Wint, Constable, Blake, Palmer, Prout, Rossetti, Whistler and many other famous and not so famous artists, with full notes on each. The author relates the English School to earlier continental artists and sums up the special characteristics and achievements of each artist. He has written twenty books including Victorian Painting, Constable, The Natural Painter and Turner and has won the Mitchell Prize for the History of Art for his catalogue raisonne on The Later Paintings and Drawings of Constable.

Paul Mellon (1907--1999) assembled one of the world’s greatest collections of British drawings and watercolors. In his memoirs he wrote of their “beauty and freshness… their immediacy and sureness of technique, their comprehensiveness of subject matter, their vital qualities, their Englishness.” This catalogue celebrating the centenary of Mellon's birth features eighty-eight outstanding watercolors from the fifty thousand works of art on paper with which he endowed the Yale Center for British Art. The selection spans the emergence of watercolor painting in the mid-18th century to its apogee in the mid-19th. These works highlight the diversity of British watercolors, showcasing both landscape and figurative works by some of the principal artists working in the medium, including Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Rowlandson, William Blake, and J. M.W. Turner.

Trevor Chamberlain's watercolour paintings are a celebration of light and atmosphere, and his skill in painting directly from nature to capture the mood of his subjects has earned him an enviable reputation among both amateur and professional artists. Here Trevor Chamberlain offers a fascinating glimpse over his shoulder as he describes his approach to interpreting the effects of light and weather using the limited watercolourist's palette. Mood in nature is his constant source of inspiration and his favoured subjects are marine, town and landscape. He particularly enjoys capturing the transient aspects of the English weather but he has also travelled extensively and enjoys the challenge of confronting the unfamiliar light and surroundings in exotic locations such as Egypt, Iran and India. An artist of the plein air tradition, he always paints directly from nature at first hand, an approach which he enthusiastically recommends to readers of this book.