British Watercolours at the British Museum

The Official War Artists scheme that was launched by the British government in 1916 would go on to commission work from some of the most significant artists of the century: William Orpen, Augustus John, Percy Wyndham Lewis and John Singer Sargent from the older generation, and from among ‘les jeunes’ (as Roger Fry dubbed them), William Roberts, Stanley Spencer, C.R.W. Nevinson, David Bomberg and Paul Nash, to name just a few. An early idea was that a great ‘War Museum’ would be purpose built to house this work: Charles Holden’s surviving sketch suggests an immense temple that would have been filled with paintings and sculptures, with Sargent’s Gassed and Nash’s Menin Road as two of its centrepieces. Hardly surprisingly the government did not have the money to invest in such a grand project after almost bankrupting itself in the defeat of Germany – it was impressive enough that it was willing to spare thousands of pounds and release young officers like Nash from active service to paint pictures.

But wouldn’t it have been a wonderful centenary project to have built that temple of war art, instead of leaving those paintings to languish in upstairs rooms at the back of the Imperial War Museum? Perhaps we will be able to afford it in time for the centenary of the Second World War instead – when the government again invested precious time and money in the production of art.

Another grand project close to my heart is a gallery that would celebrate another great British achievement – the humble watercolour, rightly or wrongly so widely and often acknowledged as a particularly British medium. Right now there is a step in that direction at the British Museum: ‘Places of the Mind: British Watercolour Landscapes, 1850-1950,’ curated by Kim Sloan. When I visited, the galleries – also located slightly off the beaten track at the back and upstairs in the BM – were pretty crowded, and Dr Sloan told me that the show was enjoying a high footfall. This deserved success clearly illustrates the public appetite for this medium and subject matter.

Paul Nash, The Wanderer, or Path through Trees (1911) British Museum

 With 125 works in watercolour, pastel and pen and ink celebrating these media in the hundred years following Turner’s death, Paul Nash’s hauntingly enigmatic 1911 painting The Wanderer, or, Path through Trees, is the opening work. It sets the tone for the whole show, and graces both the poster and the accompanying catalogue. Nash was a master at this type of work – you don’t have to look too closely at his pictures to discover how what is ostensibly a watercolour can often actually also include chalk or pen-and-ink highlights. The many other artists include James Whistler, Graham Sutherland, Ambrose McEvoy, Hercules Brabazon, Philip Wilson Steer, Henry Moore, Peter Lanyon, Ben Nicholson and John Craxton (from among my more modern favourites) as well a whole gamut of earlier Victorian practitioners: John William North, Samuel Palmer, Edward Lear, George Clausen, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Helen Allingham – all of them drawn from the Museum’s extensive Prints and Drawing Room collections. Also squeezed in are a couple of works by Francis Towne and John Sell Cotman which, whilst breaking the strict chronology of the exhibition, draw it further back into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They are worthy historical inclusions: Cotman’s Greta Bridge, for example, was a favourite of Eric Ravilious’s, who is also represented here with the very early watercolour, Wannock Dew Pond, so unlike the works of the 1930s that would make him famous.

John Sell Cotman, Greta Bridge (c.1806-7), British Museum

It’s a great show, and one that does hopefully mark another little step on the road to a permanent gallery, somewhere in England, devoted entirely to the medium and its long and distinguished history.