Great British Watercolors From the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art

Written by Matthew Hargraves

Introduction by Scott Wilcox

Published by the Yale Center for British Art and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in association with Yale University Press

232 pages, 11 x 9 1/2 inches, 118 illustrations, cloth, ISBN 978-0-30011658-8

Publication date: May 28, 2007

Description

Paul Mellon (1907–1999) assembled one of the world’s greatest collections of British drawings and watercolors. In his memoirs he wrote of their “beauty and freshness…their immediacy and sureness of technique, their comprehensiveness of subject matter, their vital qualities, their Englishness.” This catalogue celebrating the centenary of Mellon’s birth features 88 outstanding watercolors from the 50,000 works of art on paper with which he endowed the Yale Center for British Art. The selection spans the emergence of watercolor painting in the mid-eighteenth century to its apogee in the mid-nineteenth. These works highlight the diversity of British watercolors, showcasing both landscape and figurative works by some of the principal artists working in the medium, including Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Rowlandson, William Blake, and J. M. W. Turner.