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Paul Sandby
The starting point. Sandby made watercolor respectable as a way to record real places, and his obituaries called him the father of modern landscape painting in watercolors. He was a founding member of the Royal Academy in 1768, which gave the medium a foothold in the art establishment.
Look at his views of Windsor Castle and the town around it, a series Sir Joseph Banks bought. They show the tinted-drawing method at its best: careful pen and pencil structure, then clear washes laid over it. Later painters broke away from this approach, and seeing it first makes their achievement easier to measure.
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John Robert Cozens
Cozens is where watercolor first became poetry rather than record. Constable called him the greatest genius that ever touched landscape, and his Alpine and Italian views, made on tours with Richard Payne Knight from 1776 and with William Beckford in 1782, swap topographical detail for mood. The Goatherd (1778), a view above Lake Albano, shows it: dark trees, a tiny figure and a pale sky.
He did it with a very limited palette, mostly blues, grays and greens, a useful study if you reach for too many tubes. The young Girtin and Turner copied many of his watercolors, paid by Dr. Thomas Monro. The Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate Britain both hold good groups of his work.
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Thomas Girtin
Girtin died at 27, yet he changed how watercolor was built. He dropped the old habit of undershadowing in gray wash and let strong, warm color carry the drawing, which is why his sheets feel like paintings rather than tinted maps.
The one to find is The White House at Chelsea (1800): a broad Thames sky, a low horizon and a single pale building catching the light. Turner admired it, and the line usually credited to him, that he would have starved had Girtin lived, says a lot about how seriously rivals took this young man. The British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum both hold his work.
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J. M. W. Turner
Born
Turner pushed watercolor further than anyone of his time, from crisp topographical commissions in his youth to late sheets that are almost pure light. Study his color beginnings, the loose washes he laid down to set a sheet's mood before any detail, and you see how he thought in color first.
The Blue Rigi, Sunrise (1842) is the summit of the late Swiss work: a mountain dissolving into blue morning haze above Lake Lucerne. Tate bought it in 2007 for £4.95 million after a public appeal, then the most it had paid for a single work. During the appeal it hung for the first time alongside its companions, The Dark Rigi and The Red Rigi.
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John Sell Cotman
Born
Cotman is the painter to study if your washes keep going muddy. He built pictures from clean, flat areas of color laid side by side, each one left alone once it was down, and the result looks startlingly modern for its date.
Greta Bridge (around 1805), in the British Museum, came out of his summers in Yorkshire and is the classic example: a stone bridge, a house, rocks and still water reduced to a few calm shapes, with almost abstract patches of flat wash. A later, larger version is in Norwich, where he was a leading figure of the Norwich School, and the Tate holds several more of his River Greta views.
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David Cox (artist)
Cox is the painter of weather. Where other watercolorists of his generation kept their skies calm, his are full of wind and rain, and part of the effect came from his paper: he became known for a rough, absorbent "Scotch" wrapping paper that breaks a wash into a lively, uneven texture.
The Challenge: A Bull in a Storm on a Moor, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, shows him at full force, the brush attacking the sheet so the storm feels genuinely threatening. From 1844 he went every year to Betws-y-Coed in North Wales to paint outdoors, and Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, in the city where he started out as a scenery painter, holds several of his works. If your skies always come out too tidy, start here.
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Peter De Wint
De Wint is the master of wide, flat country. Where others chased drama, he painted haymaking scenes and long Lincolnshire panoramas, and showed that a low horizon and a big sky can hold a sheet together on their own.
He ranks among the chief English watercolorists, and he is worth studying for broad, confident washes laid across the whole width of a sheet, a useful counterweight to fiddly detail. The Usher Gallery in Lincoln, the city his wife came from and which he visited often, is the place to see his work. He was elected an associate of the Old Water Colour Society in 1810 and became a full member the following year. He painted in oils too, so check the medium when you look him up.
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Richard Parkes Bonington
Born
Bonington died at 25 and still left watercolors that dazzled Paris. Raised in France from the age of 14, he carried the English watercolor style across the Channel and mixed watercolor with gouache and gum to get a richness close to oil, without losing the speed.
Delacroix later praised the lightness of touch in his watercolors and compared them to diamonds. The Wallace Collection in London is the place to go: it holds a group of 35 of his works, landscapes and history pieces alike, and seeing them together shows how much light and texture a quick, sure hand can catch on a small sheet.
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Winslow Homer
Born
Homer took up watercolor seriously in the summer of 1873 in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and turned it into America's great outdoor medium. His trips south changed everything: on visits to Florida, Cuba and the Bahamas from the winter of 1884 to 1885 onward, his palette brightened into saturated blues and greens under a hard tropical sun.
Start with The Turtle Pond (1898), from his second Bahamas stay and now in the Brooklyn Museum: one young man in the water lifts a turtle while another leans over the wooden side of the pen, the sea built from layered transparent color with opaque touches. It shows the confidence and speed of the late work. Three Fisher Girls (1881), at the National Gallery of Art, shows the earlier, quieter Homer.
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Thomas Moran
Born
Moran's watercolors helped create a national park. On Ferdinand Hayden's 1871 survey of Yellowstone he documented site after site in sketches and watercolors, and together with William Henry Jackson's photographs they helped inspire Congress to establish Yellowstone as the first national park in 1872.
For a painter, the field sheets are the lesson: fast, accurate notes of strange rock color, steam and falling water made on the spot, which he later worked up into huge oils such as The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Lower Entrance to Madison Canyon, dated August 8, 1871, is one of these survey watercolors and belongs to the National Park Service. They show how much a quick color note can hold when the subject will not wait.
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John Singer Sargent
Born
Sargent is the proof that watercolor can be fast without being careless. He painted more than 2,000 of them, moving freely between transparent washes and opaque touches, and the hundreds he made in Venice, many seen from a gondola at water level, are some of the most fluent sheets ever painted.
Look at Santa Maria della Salute (1904) in the Brooklyn Museum: the church's pale stone carried by a few washes and crisp shadows, the gondolas and tangled ropes in the foreground left deliberately loose. Brooklyn bought 83 of the 86 watercolors he showed in New York in 1909. For a low view straight down a narrow canal, the Metropolitan Museum's Venetian Canal (1913) is the one to study.
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Paul Cézanne
Born
Cézanne showed that the white of the paper can do as much work as the paint. In his late years watercolor became central to his practice, and his sheets are built from small, separate touches of color with bare paper left between them, so that form seems to assemble itself as you look.
The Mont Sainte-Victoire watercolors are the obvious study: he made around 45 of the mountain, alongside more than 30 oils. Set one beside an oil of the same view and you can see the traffic between the two, since the watercolor habit of open, unfinished space fed back into his late canvases. For a painter, he is the best lesson there is in knowing when to stop.
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Emil Nolde
Born
Nolde let color run as loud as it could. His brilliant flower watercolors and brooding storm skies use saturated pigment soaked into the paper, so that blooms and clouds seem to glow from inside rather than sit on the surface.
His Unpainted Pictures are the most remarkable chapter: barred from painting after 1941, he kept working in small watercolors on Japanese paper, a series of around 1,300 dated from 1938 to 1945. The Nolde Foundation at Seebüll, his former home in northern Germany, holds the core of his work and has run a museum there since 1957. Anyone who thinks watercolor has to be delicate should spend time with these.
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Paul Klee
Born
Klee turned watercolor into a way of building with color. In April 1914 he spent twelve days in Tunisia with August Macke and Louis Moilliet, and the strong North African light pushed him into small sheets made of glowing, overlapping blocks of transparent color. It was on this trip that he wrote the famous lines that color had taken possession of him and that color and he were one.
In the Houses of Saint-Germain (1914), at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, is the sheet to study: a town reduced to a patchwork of warm and cool squares that still reads as sunlit walls. It is a direct lesson in how far a landscape can be simplified before it stops being a place.
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John Marin
Born
Marin brought watercolor into American modernism. He learned in Europe to use it for an abstract, charged atmosphere rather than a faithful view, held his first one-man show at Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery in 1909, and was among the first American artists to make abstract pictures.
Two subjects carry his reputation: the jostling towers of Manhattan and the rocky coast of Maine, where he first spent a summer in 1914 and which became one of his favorite subjects. In both he breaks the scene into slashing strokes and angled frames of color, often leaving white paper to snap around them. If your own seascapes feel stiff, his Maine sheets show how much energy a few hard, fast strokes can give.
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Georgia O'Keeffe
Born
O'Keeffe's watercolors are early and few, and they belong here because they show how little a watercolor needs. While teaching art at a college in Canyon, Texas, in 1917, she painted a short series of the evening star high in a sunset sky over the plains, each one built from a few bold bands of saturated color.
Evening Star No. III (1917), at the Museum of Modern Art, is the one most often reproduced: a small sheet, under 12 inches wide, in which a yellow disc sits inside rings of orange and red above bands of blue and green, with thin lines of bare paper keeping the colors apart. It is a useful antidote to overworking a painting, and a reminder that the medium suited abstraction early on.
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Edward Hopper
Born
Hopper proves that watercolor can carry architecture and hard light as well as any oil. Working outdoors in Gloucester, Massachusetts, he painted houses, porches and rooftops in strong sun, with crisp shadow shapes doing most of the work.
The Mansard Roof (1923), painted during his first summer in Gloucester, is the sheet to find. The Brooklyn Museum bought it out of its watercolor exhibition that same year for $100, an early vote of confidence from a museum. It shows how to handle a complicated building without fussing it: a few planes of light and shadow, striped awnings catching the breeze and plenty of bare paper.
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Charles E. Burchfield
Born
Burchfield worked almost entirely in watercolor, which was unusual among the major American painters of his time, and he showed it could work at a big scale. His middle-period pictures, from 1919 to 1943, have a solid, weighty look rarely seen in the medium, and his late works grow into large, almost hallucinatory visions of nature.
He painted standing at an easel, often with a dry-brush touch, which is worth knowing if you always work flat. Woman in Doorway (1917) at the Phillips Collection is an early, eerie example, and the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo holds the world's largest collection of his paintings.
More about Charles E. Burchfield19
Andrew Wyeth
Born
Wyeth is best known for egg tempera, but watercolor launched him and stayed at the center of how he worked. In 1937, at 20, he held his first one-man show of watercolors at the Macbeth Gallery in New York, and the whole inventory sold.
His signature is drybrush, a watercolor method in which the water is squeezed from the brush so it lays down fine, textured strokes. He worked out each subject in pencil or loosely brushed watercolor studies, often dozens of them, before the finished picture. Old Orchard (1957), at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, shows his looser side in windblown grass and weeds. Read alongside Homer, he shows the opposite route: slow, spare and limited in color, yet still unmistakably watercolor.
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