BRITISH WATERCOLOURS
HE exhibition of early British watercolours at present on a tour of New Zealand’s art galleries must be one of the most important of its kind to visit the country. The paintings — 158 of them-are on loan from various British galleries and collections, and they represent the period 1750 to 1850, when some of the greatest work in British watercolour was done, Several Turners and Constables are included, one of the former being from the original John Ruskin collection, and ‘there are two pictures from the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. The exhibition has already been shown in Australia’ and in Auckland, and it is now on view at the National Art Gallerysin Wellington, where it fills four bays of the Academy Gallery. After August 21 it will go to Wanganui, and then to Dunedin, and possibly Hamilton. Watercolour has become a peculiarly British art, and the exhibition would be well worth seeing for the Turners alone. For anyone who has only seen prints of these works it is a revelation to see the brilliant colouring of the originals. The exhibition is thoroughly representative of the period, apart from
the omission of Blake, and an interesting’ comparison can be made between much of the work and that of early New Zealand painters of the latter part of the same period. On the other hand the technique used in many of the pictures is surprisingly modern. Cozens, Rowlandson, David Cox, Peter de Wint, Girtin, Cotman, Dayes and John Varley are all well represented, and amongst the more striking individual paintings are Samuel Palmer’s Rome from the Borghese Gardens, and Henry Fuseli’s Three Female Figures with Baskets. The Empire Art Loan Exhibitions Society, through which the exhibition was arranged, was founded in 1932 by a New Zealander, Sir Percy Sargood.. The Society’s patron is Lady Freyberg. Its object is to arrange for exhibitions of representative works from public or private sources for loan to galleries and societies within the Commonwealth, and to help remove the restrictions on the lending of original works overseas, This is the Society’s first post-war exhibition.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 528, 5 August 1949, Page 13
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350BRITISH WATERCOLOURS New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 528, 5 August 1949, Page 13
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