|
 |
 |
|
English Water Colors: Whistler and Mary Cassatt used water color as well as other media, but they had more influence on European painting than on American. Sargent, a master portraitist in oils, turned to water color to escape the boredom of his success in the other medium. His beautiful, facile water colors of European scenes provided a model of technical excellence. Thomas Eakins (1844—1916) was more interested in reality of expression than in any particular means to produce this end. His water colors are in solid, clear colors of tempera.
A m ber of topographical painters, such as Jacob ( (1741-1799) and Johannes Huibert Prins (17, 1805), made water colors of the quiet trim Du towns which are entirely comparable to those tl being produced in England. At the same tim< number of Swiss artists, among them Johann L wig Aberli (1723-1786) and Sigmund Freud berger (1745-1801), were drawn to record water colors the picturesque beauties of tl mountains and the peasant life in the valleys. 1 French were more hesitant in adopting I medium as an end in itself, but the fashion English ways at the beginning of the 19th centi eventually introduced it to them.
English Water Colors: 1750-1850.-If we seek reasons for the enthusiasm for this medium, we find that English patrons were beginning to demand the portrayal of places with known associations, and were cultivating that love of landscape which reached its peak in the painting, no less than the poetry, of the romantic movement. Water color was found to be especially fit for rendering the nuances of cloudy skies and the varied greens of foliage, and for echoing those effects of atmosphere and mist in the absence of which landscape painting can become a mere unimaginative transcript of fact, without emotional comment. The first considerable artist to devote most of his career to painting in water color was Paul Sandby (1725-1809). |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
