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 leadingVictorians 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.

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.

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

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.

Published to accompany the exhibition, 'The golden age of watercolours: the Hickman Bacon collection', held at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 19 September 2001 - 6 January 2002.

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.

1998 marks the 40th anniversary of the bequest to the British Museum by the collector Robert Wylie Lloyd (1868-1958) of fifty of Turner's finest watercolours. This book has been published to accompany a special exhibition of the collection.