A Shimmering Moment for Watercolor

What little is known by contemporary artists about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) is based on disparaging remarks about the 19th-century English artists who tried to align themselves with artists who worked before the time of Raphael, the great 16th-century Renaissance master.

To address that lack of information and appreciation, Tate Britain in London has been conducting technical research and presenting a series of exhibitions on the group and its individual members. The most recent of those shows, "Pre-Raphaelite Vision," brought together a large group of oil and watercolor paintings of dazzling brilliance, extraordinary detailing, and unprecedented naturalism. One of the most revealing aspects of the display was the close association between pictures created with the two mediums. It seemed to establish, at least through the eyes of this writer, that the PRB found watercolor to be the superior medium for conveying the sense of light within a landscape.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in 1849 by William Holman Hunt (1827?1910), D.G. Rossetti (1828?1882), John Everett Millais (1829?1896), William Michael Rossetti (1829?1919), James Collinson (1825?1881), Thomas Woolner (1825?1892), and F.G. Stephens (1828?1907). All the painters and writers associated with the group were strongly influenced by John Ruskin (1819?1900), the renowned writer and artist, who urged artists to draw and paint directly from nature. "They should go to nature in all singleness to hear, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to penetrate her meanings; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing," he wrote.

While the research conducted by the Tate's conservation department does not suggest that the Pre-Raphaelites were deliberately mimicking the effects of watercolor with their oil paints, it does point out the pains taken by the artists to achieve the same sense of brilliance by laying glazes of oil color over stark white grounds. Just as watercolorists apply veils of transparent color over sheets of white paper, the members of the PRB thinned their oils with copal painting medium and applied them to canvases and panels coated with layers of zinc white paint.

"The startlingly bright colours, the distinctive paint application, the legendary use of zinc white as a ground with paint applied on top wet-in-wet, and the pristine condition of the works are all cited frequently and uncritically in art historical literature," write three members of the Tate conservation department?Jacqueline Ridge, the senior paintings conservator, Joyce Townsend, the senior conservation scientist, and Stephen Hackney, the head of conservation science?in a book they have just published, Pre-Raphaelite Painting Techniques (Tate Britain, London, England). "One specific material issue is the well-documented use of copal resin both in the paint and as a varnish. ? The paints were hand-ground to give a workable glaze colour, and the amounts of pigment, oil, copal resin were recorded. ? The results were extremely colourful when complete!"

In recent correspondence with this author, Ridge commented about the connection between watercolor and oil paintings by members of the PRB: "We did not specifically deal with their water colours in our book. However, I think it is fair to say that some parallels can be drawn between their oil painting techniques and those used in creating water colours. However, it is important to take on board that their easel paintings were intended to be just that, and they desired a high level of finish with saturated rich colours. As I am sure you are aware, oil painting at this time was considered a far superior endeavour to water colour painting and their aims reflect this."

The concern for accurately representing colors in nature persuaded the PRB to take their sketchpads and easels outside to work. "Central to the plein air project of the Pre-Raphaelites was a concern to apprehend colour as it really appeared in nature, a concern that led to attempts to make distinctions such as that between 'absolute' colours (those possessed by objects when seen separately, uninfluenced by any other) and 'apparent' ones (those adjusted by one another when seen in combination)," explains Allison Smith, a senior curator at Tate Britain, in the catalog for the recent exhibition. In fact, several artists used viewing devices to isolate colors and "establish the 'absolute' identity of each individual hue rather than compromise the colours of nature into an overall scheme," Smith adds.

This emphasis on brilliant, transparent colors was part of the PRB's push toward "an unprecedented and open-ended investigation into the laws governing picture making and the limitations of realism in art," explains Smith. The laws being challenged were those established by the Royal Academy and other entrenched institutions that insisted on a "hierarchically organized composition in which the background was subordinate to the main human interest."

One of the "open-ended investigations" dealt with the "employment of bright local colours with non-obtrusive facture and minimum shadow, abrupt disjunctions of scale, and non-linear flattening qualities." That is, the artists were challenging themselves to accept nature as it existed out their studio windows, not to reorder it according to some academic formula. Their preference was to select painting sites "by happenstance or according to where they had acquaintances who offered accommodations," rather than base their landscapes on accepted studio formulas.

Of all the members of the PRB, William Holman Hunt was the most concerned about the quality of his materials and with techniques that would allow him to accurately record his perceptions. "Of particular value are his extensive commentaries on contemporary artist's materials which allow us to trace, as he did, the introduction and failure of many early synthetic products devised to expand the limited range of materials and introduce new possibilities to the artistic repertoire," writes Melissa R. Katz, a conservator with the Davis Museum of Art at Wellesley College in the book Looking Through Paintings (Uitgeverij de Prom, The Netherlands, and Archetype Publications, United Kingdom).

Quoting extensively from Hunt's writings, Katz explains how Hunt used oils with wet-in-wet techniques similar to those employed by watercolorists. "On the morning for the painting, with fresh white (from which all superfluous oil has been extracted by means of absorbent paper, and to which a small drop of varnish has been added) spread a further coat very evenly with a palette knife over the part for the day's work, of such consistency that the drawing should faintly show through," Hunt wrote. "Over this wet ground, the colour (transparent and semi-transparent) should be laid with light sable brushes."

After a relatively short period of time, the Pre-Raphaelites began to reconsider their insistence of working directly from nature and avoiding any hint of imagination or personal interpretation. They began to allow themselves to work in the studio from sketches and to yield to the growing interest in romantic themes.

"The preoccupation with effect in later Victorian landscape painting led to an emphasis on nostalgia which ? signaled disaffection with the modern world, with many painters averting their gaze from encroaching signs of urbanization," concludes Smith.

The inclusion of so many plein air works in the Tate exhibition helps to bring a new appreciation of Pre-Raphaelite painting, particularly among those who admire the special qualities of watercolor paintings. Stripped of the theatrical costuming and romantic storytelling of other Victorian paintings, these pure landscapes make a direct connection to modern ideas about picture making, especially among those artists who now use stable natural and synthetic pigments to capture the brilliance of sunlit forms. Watercolorists who now use quinacridone, phthalocyanine, and cadmium colors to create vibrant glazes of color on white paper can learn a great deal from their 19th-
century brethren.

For more information about "Pre-Raphaelite Vision" or to order the books mentioned in this article, visit the Tate Britain's Web site at www.tate.org.uk.