Water feast

English watercolor in the Hermitage

The best gift for a patron of the arts is an exhibition of his works. The centenary of Andrew Mellon, an American admirer of English watercolors, is being celebrated at the State Hermitage with a successful exhibition. The Twelve Column Hall features 88 sheets from 45 masters. The exhibition is organized by the State Hermitage Museum together with the Yale Center for British Art (New Haven, USA) and the Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond, Virginia, USA).

It is not forbidden to call watercolor a purely English genre. It was in Foggy Albion that the art of working with water paints reached perfection. Suffice it to say that the tonal division of space into three planes, which dominated in European painting until the end of the 18th century, was replaced by lighter, more fluid, elusive transitions precisely under the influence of English watercolors.

The exhibition is dominated by landscape. Most often you can see a variety of water surfaces - the captured English and Italian lakes are innumerable. One of the most interesting sections of the exhibition can be called “the birth of Turner.” Having looked at seven works by the artist, surrounded by masterpieces by Cozens, Gainsborough, Guertin and Sandby, one can understand how the master of understatement who is now especially famous and valuable was born from a craftsman of topographically accurate drawings. This value has a fairly precise measurement. The watercolor “Mount Rigi: View of Lake Lucerne at Sunrise,” which became a hit at Turner’s recent London exhibition, was bought from its owner for more than $10 million—a figure never paid for a watercolor. During the author’s lifetime, this work received the highest praise from John Ruskin, who declared Turner the greatest artist of his time. The master, who is sometimes called the father of watercolor, began his career by copying fashionable types of picturesque landscapes, castles, and ruins. Turner was greatly influenced by William Gilpin’s teaching on the harmony of colors, which advised “reducing the entire picture to the main, or key, tone, which in a landscape should always be taken from a cloudless area of ​​the sky.” Gilpin's travel diaries (published in the 1780s), praising the beauty of the unspoiled country side, contributed greatly to the popularization of watercolors. Turner was determined to achieve recognition and throughout his life he tried to prove that landscape can express the highest concepts and feelings no worse than historical painting. In an effort to express a feeling of merging with nature, he accompanied the titles of paintings in exhibition catalogs with quotes from his favorite poets (Thomson, Milton) or his own poems, which dealt with light or atmospheric phenomena.

The Hermitage exhibits the excellent work “Tour. Sunset. Waiting to return”, executed on blue paper. Turner learned its capabilities from the Cozenses, whom he considered his teachers. The works of John and Alexander Cozens are located next door. Alexander Cozens, the author of several hundred drawings and a number of theoretical works devoted mainly to the principles of drawing landscape compositions, made a name for himself with his bizarre black “spots”. Having sketched an arbitrary abstraction on a sheet of paper with quick movements of the brush, he recognized in the chaotic sketch “hints” of the general structure of the future painting and, following his imagination, gradually transformed the chaotic forms into a finished work. John Cozens' lyrical landscapes are built on combinations of delicate grayish-brown and greenish tones, without bright spots or sharp contrasts. He does not have landscapes painted from a close point of view; the scene almost always spans several dozen miles, and above this endless vista the majestic circle of the sun reigns...

Let's return to Turner, who dreamed of creating a kind of encyclopedia of the landscape, showing the diversity of its possibilities. In an effort to prove that a landscape can evoke a wide variety of experiences, feelings and thoughts, he boldly went against generally accepted canons. The artists firmly believed that any painting should be painted in muted dark brownish colors - to match the darkened varnish on the canvases of the old masters. Art lovers carried with them a yellow filter called “Claude Lorrain glass” (named after the 17th-century French painter, recognized as the standard of academic landscape), and, using it instead of a monocle, they contemplated canvases that had acquired the golden tones of antiquity. Even Turner's restrained attempts to capture bright daylight and lighten his palette earned him the pejorative nickname "white artist." (True, sometimes, for example in “View of Eagleboro,” Turner also worked under Lorrain.)

Turner loved to paint rainbows. His most famous painting is “Lake Buttermere. With a Rainbow and a Shower" (1798; London National Gallery) shocks art historians with the impossible reflection of a rainbow in water in reality. Constable also liked the rainbow, and only took up watercolors in his old age. “Study of the Sky” (1827) presented at the exhibition is perhaps not very impressive, but another watercolor, “Barrodale. Evening after a wonderful day. October 1, 1806" is fascinating.

Was the path of Turner and Constable typical of all English watercolors? Of course not, but both geniuses contributed to the success of water-based paints. In the 19th century, thanks to Thomas Guertin, who began to use watercolor in large format paintings, it turned into perhaps the most important type of English painting.

Sergey KUZNETSOV, St. Petersburg