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.

Enchanted Dreams: The Pre-Raphaelite Art of E.R. Hughes, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery

Spending one’s days studying the avant-garde of the early twentieth century, it’s sometimes none too easy to stop and think about what those artists were actually reacting against. What were most gallery-goers actually looking at and admiring when David Bomberg, for example, was painting his extraordinary abstracts in the years immediately prior to the First World War? Edward Robert Hughes – Ted Hughes to his friends – was one of them: his ‘blue phantasies’ at the Royal Watercolour Society’s annual summer shows were among the crowd pleasers – curious visions of fairyland and mystical interpretations of Victorian poems. 

E.R. Hughes, Oh, What’s That in the Hollow? (1893)

Hughes was born to be an artist. His uncle was the painter Arthur Hughes, a painter with closes link to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in its earliest days, who numbered Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Ruskin among his friends. So, literally from the cradle, Hughes lived among artists and critics. He entered the Royal Academy Schools aged 16, and was something of a star pupil. Though he worked in oil, it was in watercolour that he would make his name. The early work is very different in style and technique from the later works – though it can be equally haunting. ‘Mrs Peveril Turnbull and her daughter Monica’ feels like an illustration to an M.R. James short story, even before you discover that Monica and her sister were later to die together in a house fire.

This show lines up many other artists along side Hughes, but he often comes off looking second best to the likes of Henri Fantin-Latour or Fernand Khnopff (sadly in reproduction only). Hughes is certainly the lesser painter, but nonetheless a work such as ‘Oh, What’s That in the Hollow? (1893) and ‘Night With her Train of Stars’, are really something special. I can’t imagine the Bloomsbury Group caring for any of this – and the Futurists certainly did not when they visited London: it was exactly this sort of painting that seemed to the Italians to say nothing of the ‘Workshop of the World’, let alone of London, the Futurist city 'par excellence'. Indeed, they thought paintings like this ought to be carried out into Trafalgar Square and burnt, making way for a modern art of a modern world. But Hughes's paintings carry me back to the days of my youth when I first discovered the delights of the Pre-Raphaelites. And I know - unlikely as it may seem - that it was just this sort of painting that inspired the likes of Augustus John, Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer and helped set them out on the road to becoming artists. 

E.R. Hughes, Night With her Train of Stars and Her Great Gift of Sleep (1912)

And besides, in a way there's nothing wrong with fairyland, when it's taking you away from the miseries of what industrial Britain must have been like. It is quite easy to see the appeal of these medieval fantasies for a smoke-filled world, stalked by slow or sudden death and opium dreams. (Hughes' fiancee died a lingering, youthful death from tuberculosis, such a killer in that era, even among the wealthier classes; and night with her stars in tow drops poppy petals - and does the baby in her arm sleep the sleep of night, or that of death?.) The best of these Victorian artists are always worth revisiting, and even as a critic of the avant grade, I can linger profitably in a world at a cross roads, where the nineteenth century meets the twentieth.