Art of the elemental

THE GOLDEN AGE OF WATERCOLOURS __

THE catastrophic decline of watercolour as a medium is clearly illustrated by the fact that the two most famous practitioners of the last 100 years are Adolf Hitler and Prince Charles. A few major modern artists, mostly based in Germany, have used watercolour to good effect, but overwhelmingly it has become the preserve of the amateur and the cultural conservative.

The Golden Age of Watercolours proves that watercolours haven't always been so wet. For about a century, from 1750 to 1850, watercolour was as cutting-edge medium as videocam is now, but far more fertile. Its major exponents were British, and its emergence as a serious medium coin- cided with the rise of the Empire and the tourist industry. Being portable and quick-drying, watercolour was perfect for recording exotic places and people, at home as well as abroad.

This exhibition features 82 works selected from the world's finest private collection formed by the aristocratic property developer, inventor and philanthropist Sir Hickman Bacon at the turn of the 20th century. The collection is particularly

strong in the work of Girtin, Turner and Cotman.

The short-lived Thomas Girtin (1775-1802) is the most ascetic of watercolourists.

You feel like a hermit in the desert when you look at his view of The River Wharfe (c1800), with its brown tonalities and mile-wide empty vistas. A plume of smoke rises from a bonfire in the far distance, like a tantalising white oasis. Girtin's magnificently eerie View of the Gate of St Denis (c1802), made during a brief cessation of hostilities in the Napoleonic Wars, transforms this bustling suburb of Paris into a Pompeian ghost town.

Hickman Bacon was unusual for his time for his appreciation of late Turner (Rainbow over a Swiss Lake shows him at his most ruthlessly lucid), and he virtually rediscovered the work of John Sell Cotman (1782-1842).

Cotman's Welsh landscapes, such as Calder Idris (c1835), consist of a few simple slabs of deep colour, which abut each other like shifting tectonic plates.

Works like these prove that, at its best, watercolour is the art of the elemental.

_ Until 6 January.

Information: 020 8693 5254.

Copyright 2001
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