Description: The importance of the nineteenth-century British watercolorists has often been underestimated. J.W.M. Turner's late, ethereal watercolors, so central to the canon, became widely popular only with the advent of abstract painting in the 1940s and 1950s. Turner's friend Thomas Girton, one of the first artists to exploit watercolor as a medium in its own right, was another innovator, whose landscape art demonstrates astonishing visual, spatial, emotional, and technical breadth. Another of Turner's contemporaries, John Sell Cotman, produced watercolors astonishing in their apparent modernity; his work, too, really began to become popular only in the twentieth century. Other nineteenth-century watercolors, by both English and French artists, anticipate Impressionism in their growing freedom of expression. This lavishly illustrated edition focuses on Sir Hickman Bacon's collection, the world's most important, offering a timely and landmark addition to our understanding of watercolor painting.

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