cover image British Watercolours Grea

British Watercolours Grea

Andrew Wilton, Anne Lyles. Te Neues Publishing Company, $75 (0pp) ISBN 978-3-7913-1254-5

The ambitious subject matter, versatile brushwork and daring conceptions of watercolorists William Blake, Thomas Rowlandson, J.M.W. Turner, Samuel Palmer, David Cox, James Whistler and 81 other artists enliven this magificient album. It catalogues an exhibition that opened at London's Royal Academy and soon moves to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. The standing stones seem to dance in John Constable's Stonehenge. One can find precursors of impressionism, expressionism, surrealism and abstraction among the 320 color plates and 60 black-and-white reproductions which, taken as a whole, alter one's view of British watercolor. Art historians Wilton and Lyles, both with London's Tate Gallery, ably trace the intellectual cross-currents of a peculiarly English movement that marked an unshackling of the imagination, a shift from observation to expression. (Apr.)