If our museums each personified a medium, then Tate Britain would probably be watercolour (the National Gallery would have to be oil paint, the British Museum would be carved stone and Tate Modern could be enormo-sculptural installation, preferably in neon). Indeed, almost everything in this wide-ranging exhibition comes from Tate’s well-stocked cupboards and coffers, but due to the fragility of these water-based works they don’t often get to see the light of day – a horribly sunburnt and bleached Turner sketch halfway through makes the conservationist’s point brilliantly.
This rare window of opportunity (although not brief – It's on display through August) should make for a celebration of all things pale and interesting, but as is so often the case at Tate Britain, completism and historic worthiness makes this heavy going, especially for such a weightless subject.
We learn that watered-down paint was initially employed for maps and illuminated manuscripts in the Middle Ages – in which it’s still possible to imagine the skilled labourers first marvelling in horror at that wonderful crinkly effect when the drying paper buckles under the loose pigment. Watercolour was then used to paint portrait miniatures on ivory or vellum, presumably because it could be applied with brushes made from a single hair if necessary.
The medium’s accuracy and immediacy suited pre-photographic botanists and other scientific types too, but after all this close observation comes some welcome swaths of filler and runny gestures in the form of landscape painting – where watercolour is really at its liquid best. Yet this section doesn’t so much revel in the medium as continue to tick art historical boxes: watercolour paints were portable and affordable, we are told, allowing some colonel from the East India Company to sit painting on the Ganges or John Frederick Lewis to swiftly capture the bustle of a Cairo street market.
Thankfully, such mere topography soon gives way to John Sell Cotman’s far-off deep blue hills, ‘On the Downs’ (1835), and Edward Burra’s much simplified ‘Valley and River, Northumberland’ (1972). These more sparing artists realised that the light bouncing through the paint and off the paper is what gives watercolour its real power, rather than its ability to depict every last detail. (Of course, exactitude isn’t all bad, as Richard Dadd and William Holman Hunt show in two highly concentrated studies of barren, rocky vistas.)
Thomas Girtin was perhaps the true originator of a British tradition favouring an economy of means, given how ‘The White House of Chelsea’ (1800) is constructed from just two or three subtle colour washes and a few choice linear strokes standing in for boats and a windmill. He clearly influenced his contemporary JMW Turner, whose later ‘Blue Rigi’ (1842) borrows Girtin’s wild focal burst of white light, variously known in watercolour lexicon as ‘stopping out’ (when an area is treated with gum to dispel the wash), or else as being ‘lifted out’ or ‘reserved’ – simply left unpainted.
Watercolour’s coming of age, away from its throwaway usefulness as a recording device or a must-have travel tool, provides the most compelling story within the Tate’s trundling 800-year chronology. Societies and exhibitions sprang up in its honour, while Edward Burne-Jones and Samuel Palmer proved that one need not paint watercolours solely at postcard size. Suddenly, there are rapid bursts of experimentation: in the fascinating automatic blottings of Alexander Cozens (whose 1780s experiments preceded the psychological Rorschach ink tests by more than a century), and in Andy Goldsworthy’s melting snow, which releases its natural soil trail on paper.
Despite being stretched molecule-thin by a section on war and in some muted contemporary mishandlings, the humble watercolour comes out of the wash capable of richness, delicacy, courage and sweetness. Nowhere is this see-through, lightweight medium given its correct dues as perhaps the most technically demanding of all artists’s materials. But at least the final rooms go some way to summing up why us Brits, in particular, have unearthed its vaporous potentialities – from Turners and Peter Doigs that look like they’ve been left out in the rain to a series of minimal monochrome squares by Callum Innes in which light, colour and water effects acquiesce as one.