Coming at last to our text, Water-Colors—the art of depicting nature on a
sheet of white paper by paints diluted with water—it will be well to remind you
that the art goes back to almost prehistoric times. A few weeks ago, in the
library of Mr. Jesse Carter, director of the American Academy in Rome, I saw one
of the earliest water-colors in existence. It was painted upon a sheet of slate,
and, although some thousands of years old, still retained its color and
remarkable brilliancy. The subject was a group of figures, the centre object
being a girl of wonderful grace.
The present art of water-color painting, with a sheet of white paper as
background instead of the permanent stone, is, however, but little more than one
hundred and fifty years old, and owes its existence largely to the men of the
English school.
Mr. C. E. Hughes, in his delightful book on "Early English Water Color,"
confined this English school to the men born between the years 1720 and 1820. cheap oil paintings
In this group he places the great Gainsborough, who from 1760 to 1774 worked
"in charcoal and water-color on tinted paper," which he said he "loved to dash
off of an evening, and which dazzled the fine ladies and gentlemen who
frequented the select watering-place of Bath," where he was then living.
Then came Robert Cozens, the brothers Sanby, Thomas Hearne, Thomas Malton,
Samuel Scott, and a few others, all known as the eighteenth-century
painters. oil painting for sale
These were succeeded by Thomas Girtin, who was born in 1775 and died at
twenty-seven years of age; and the great J. M. W. Turner, who first saw the
light in the same year, and on the day on which all great Englishmen should be
born—namely, April 23—a day dedicated to St. George and the birthday of William
Shakespeare.
Girtin and Turner worked together. Girtin, measured by the standard of
to-day, was an extreme impressionist, leaving behind him sketches dashed in with
an appearance of freedom which Peter DeWint and David Cox might have envied when
in after years they were at the height of their power. Turner, on the contrary,
devoted his time to acquiring that triumphant grasp of detail which caused him
to be known in his earlier life as an extreme realist. oil paintings wholesale
The change in Turner's work—the broader brush—came in his later years when
oil became his medium of expression, in which, no doubt, his ability to note and
yet sacrifice all unnecessary detail was a potent factor.
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