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LEARNING FROM
THE MASTERS
John Singer Sargent described watercolor as “making the best Most artists of the time regarded watercolor as a mere
of an emergency.” The artist aptly referred to a medium that sketching tool for working out preparatory drawing ideas for
is at once elemental in its simplicity, illusive in its control, future oils and not as a predominant mode of expression. One
yet able to capture the vagaries of the artist’s temperament such artist was Thomas Sully (1783–1872), who reportedly
and world around us. Our most valuable education in art will did over two thousand portraits in his lifetime. In his early
come from the accomplished artists who have gone before us. years, Sully produced mostly miniature portraits, and at the
By studying their works, we can glean methods of technique age of nineteen he produced his first oil painting. He was
as well as what they viewed as essential in portraying their hugely successful, with clients from Boston to Charleston, as
subject matter. well as having done a portrait of Queen Victoria. As a mature
Some of the earliest watercolors may be those of Raphael artist, Sully increasingly turned to watercolor to flesh out
in the early sixteenth century, when he sent designs for his drawings for future paintings, often filling entire sketchbooks
Vatican tapestries to the Flemish weavers in Brussels. The with studies that evoked a sentimental narrative. A page from
full-scale cartoons were done in color, with the hues fixed in a his sketchbook titled Sheet of Figure Studies depicts several
form of animal glue and mixed with white, much like today’s
gouache. At the same time, Albrecht Dürer was using a simi-
lar-bodied pigment for his well-known studies of animals and
micro-landscapes. Other beginnings in watercolor painting
were evident in the illuminated manuscript, or book decora-
tions, and then later in the miniature portrait.
The first works of art in the Western tradition to be pro-
duced in this country were watercolor. Artists such as Jacque
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Le Moyne in the sixteenth century, and later Edwin White-
field and John James Audubon, made use of the water-based
medium during expeditions to record images of the newly dis-
covered western territories and their birds and animals. The
compact portability of watercolor made it ideal to record ac-
curate renderings for botany and zoology and also to describe
the effects of the landscape’s changing light and atmosphere.
Most of the works being done in America at the time were
portraits painted in the European Baroque tradition. Minia-
ture portraits became fashionable in the nineteenth century
with the rising middle class, partly because the small like-
nesses were durable and could be easily transported. Henry
Benbridge (1722–1789) was a southern artist whose portraits
on small ovals of ivory were meticulously done using a stip-
pling effect. The miniscule brush marks Benbridge used were
painted with just the few hairs of a pointed brush to achieve
Henry Benbridge,
his convincing textures of skin, hair, and clothing. Other well- Portrait of William Gibbes
known artists of the period, such as Benjamin West, admired 1743, watercolor on ivory, 1¼ x 1⅛ in.
From the collection of the Gibbes Mu-
the look of the medium and did numerous “watercolors,” seum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina
which were later discovered to be not watercolor at all but oils
Early American artists made use of ivory’s
thinned out to mimic the luminous effect. white, durable surface to show off the lumi-
nous qualities of watercolor.
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careful renderings of people in different poses. Sully often ex- Homer was the first artist to show true technical bravura
tolled the virtues of using watercolor sketches to his students and carry the potential of watercolor to its furthest limits.
and included the advice in his book Hints to Young Artists, A self-taught artist, he began as an illustrator for Harper’s
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which was published the year after his death. Bazaar and later would revolutionize the medium and be
Up until this period, watercolor was still considered as a the first to produce watercolors on paper of epic scale and
medium for amateurs. Its genteel qualities appealed to women, meaning. Many of Homer’s watercolors were executed based
and before long watercolor had taken the place of embroi- on his knowledge of oil technique, with clearly demarcated
dery as a cultivated, leisure occupation, particularly in the areas. Highlighted areas were often painted using thick, white
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Classes for women were opaque paint.
available in many large cities, with the favored subject matter Many of Homer’s works were painted in the Adirondacks
usually flowers. or near his studio in Prout’s Neck, Maine, where he lived
It wasn’t until the late 1800s that watercolors were an isolated life. He was a devoted plein air artist and wrote
deemed by the public to be worthy of collecting. America that he preferred painting outdoors to get the true essence of
went from a mirroring of what was being painted in Europe to the subject. Although he did many of his paintings indoors,
a having a dominant position with the newly adopted medium Homer lamented that in the studio “You get composition, but
of watercolor. Several artists, such as Winslow Homer (1836– you lose freshness: you miss the subtle and, to the artist, the
1910) and his lifelong friend John LaFarge, enjoyed great finer characteristics of the scene itself.”
success at this time, with Homer’s first one-man show of just In 1881, Homer sailed to England, where he stayed for a
watercolors exhibited in 1880. Homer’s work was especially year and a half. His painting Girls on a Cliff shows two young
well received in Boston, where New Englanders’ avoidance of girls picking flowers on a cliff high above the sea. His use of
anything too ostentatious made watercolor, as opposed to oils, opaque white is evident in the depiction of billowing clouds,
the perfect, more modest collectable. By then the American as well as his use of blotting, lifting, and scraping techniques
Watercolor Society had been started (with Homer as a found- to enliven the ground and vegetation.
ing member), and America had embraced its new medium. Several years later, Homer would paint his most mature
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Thomas Eakins,
John Biglen in a Single Scull
Circa 1873–1874, watercolor on paper,
195∕ 6 x 24⅞ in.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Thomas Eakins frequently used friends as
models. His careful attention to perspective
and proportion gives his paintings volume
and depth.
watercolors in the Bahamas and Bermuda, which he said were tured a large group of rowing scenes, which included oils and
“as good work as I ever did.” His painting The Sponge Diver watercolors. Breaking from the traditional scenes and motifs
depicts a half-submerged diver seen from the back clinging of his contemporaries, Eakins’s theme of men sculling on the
to the stern of a boat with one hand and grasping a sponge in river in Philadelphia had never before been depicted in art.
his other hand. Homer’s bold, wet brushstrokes are master- The Sculler (1874) was the artist’s first known watercolor to
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fully done, depicting the man’s glistening back as well as the be sold.
jewel-like expanse of water. It is believed that the painting was Mary Cassatt (1844–1923) was an American painter and
later reworked in the studio, scraping away the upper part of printmaker who lived most of her adult life in France. It was
the landmass at the right to suggest greater recession into the there that she befriended Edgar Degas and showed her works
distance. To bring more focus to the diver and boat, Homer with the innovative Impressionists. Cassatt began her formal
marked the image for cropping, nearly an inch in on both sides art training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at
of the painting. the age of fifteen and would continue her studies through the
Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) was an instructor for many Civil War. Although she came from a wealthy family, her father
years at the esteemed Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts was not supportive of her desire to be a professional artist and
in Philadelphia, where he maintained a highly influential pres- insisted she pay for her own art supplies.
ence in the art world. Eakins’s renderings with watercolor had Although she was proficient in oils, pastels, and print-
a more polished finish, as he imbued his watercolors with the making, Cassatt was also comfortable working in watercolor,
same attention to detail as his oils. Though Eakins was known as seen in her Self Portrait. The image shows the artist
best for his oils, the artist sometimes did oil paintings as dressed in the fashionable style of the time, with an elegant
studies for future watercolors, such as John Biglen in a Single hat casting a shadow over her face, and looking past her easel
Scull. For this painting, he worked out the convincing sense toward the mirror (and viewer). Her style is confident yet
of depth by drawing a mathematical diagram, a method he explorative, done in abbreviated washes and brushstrokes of
learned from his father, who was a calligrapher. Eakins would broken color that would become her signature style. Cassatt was
employ the method of using a precise grid as an aid for draw- intrigued for most of her career with the shapes and textures
ing perspective for most of his career. of current attire and often used socialites as figures in her
The artist’s first works upon returning from Europe fea- paintings. However, many of her most recognizable images
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flattened, cut-out shapes, Matisse approached watercolor with
an equally simplistic interpretation, giving free rein to the me-
John Singer Sargent, The Cashmere Shawl
dium. Matisse’s Nude, dated about 1905, would set the course 1911, watercolor on paper, 20 x 14 in.
for a more innovative approach to the new American medium Hayden Collection, Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston
by allowing the watercolor to flow across the paper without
The cashmere shawl was one of Sargent’s
restraints. For his 1908 New York debut, and subsequent
most reoccurring props in his work and was
exhibition in 1910, Mattise’s work consisted largely of water- painted with simplicity, yet with a convincing
color and works on paper, giving new status to the medium. sense of form.
By the 1920s, the standards of the traditional ateliers had
been swept away by the more forward-thinking avant-garde.
Since watercolor wasn’t being taught in the art schools, the
opportunity for more freedom of personal expression created medium for part or all of their careers. O’Keeffe’s painting
the perfect gateway for contemporary American artists to take Seated Nude XI is an example of the artist’s exploration of
the medium to new heights. Watercolor could now move away form through the medium.
from the traditional highly representational look to paintings Since then, watercolor has made even further strides with
with more vigorous brushstrokes, white spaces, and areas of noted twenty-first-century figure painters such as Andrew Wy-
color breaking free from the original drawing with forms that eth, Jamie Wyeth, Stephen Scott Young, Dean Mitchell, and
were suggested rather than defined. Leaders of the modern- Henry Casselli. From these artists, as well as from the masters
ist movement, such as Edward Hopper, Charles Burchfield, of the past, we have learned that there are no limits to the ways
William Glackens, Charles Demuth, John Marin, and Georgia in which watercolor can be manipulated or to the subject mat-
O’Keeffe (1887–1986), would adopt watercolor as a primary ter and style in which it can be applied.
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been done. Working in watercolor allowed
him to explore the shapes, colors, and mood
of the female nude.
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