A list of Englishmen greatly prized in their day now follows. Such men as
John Varly, Gilpin, Glover, William Havell (all of whom during some part of
their careers were members of the first Water Color Society formed in England, in 1804, which
body still survives in the old Water Color Society whose rooms are still open on
Pall Mall East) rose into prominence, their works finding places both in private
and public collections. oil paintings on canvas for sale
This society was in turn succeeded by the New Society of Painters in
Miniature and Water Colors, which came into being in 1807 and went out of
existence in 1812—a victim, says Hughes, of the condition of public apathy which
brought about in the same year a reconstruction of the older organization under
the joint title of the Oil and Water Color Society, and which eked out a
precarious existence until the birth of the association now known as the Royal
Institute for Painters in Water Colors. oil paintings for sale
Other names now confront us, among them two men, David Cox and Peter DeWint,
who in their day were considered masters of the medium. These last struck a new
note in water-color, or rather a new technic in its handling. What Ruskin, the realist,
in his "Modern Painters" describes as "blottesque" was at that time looked upon
by both teachers and students as the one and only means by which white paper
could be properly stained. This method, to quote from a loyal believer in the
English transparent school, and whose enthusiasm is delightful, was the laying
on of the color in washes which filled certain definite spaces indicated by a
pen-and-ink outline. art oil paintings for sale
These washes would indicate, say, a distant tree with a preliminary tint and
a subsequent elaboration; he would do it all in one process, giving his blot an
irregular edge and allowing the color to accumulate where the shadows required
it. His elaborative touches elsewhere were of the same nature. They were brush
blots as distinct from washes. To this, I think, we may attribute on analysis
the freedom of handling which—though each man has his distinctive method—is
characteristic of both Cox and DeWint. If we add to these two methods of using
the brush a third—its manipulation as though it were a pen—we shall have all the
fluid processes on one or the other of which the beauty of all modern
water-color drawings depends. A fourth process is rubbing the color into the
grain of the paper. A fifth—a supplementary one—is scratching out. Last is the
ignominy of the stipple—the wetting of the brush in the mouth, a technic
entirely dependent upon the quantity of saliva the student can spare for his
work. Almost every early wash water-color in existence can be classified
according to the employment in its making of some or all of these means. oil painted portraits
In later years, especially in the last half of the eighteenth century, we
have Copley Fielding; Prout, with his picturesque sepia drawings, the detail of
his architecture in brown ink; Harding; Bonnington, really a great man; Clarkson Stanfield;
Rowbotham; David Roberts; James Holland; Cattermole, who declined a knighthood
and whose intimates were Dickens, Disraeli, and Thackeray; and so on down to the
men of to-day, who are so well and ably represented in the annual exhibitions of
the Royal Academy and the present English Water Color Societies. oil paintings of flowers
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