WILLIAMSBURG — Take a walk back through the history of Western watercolor painting and you won't have too far to travel. Up until the middle of the 18th century, the medium was limited to a largely cosmetic role and used to dress up such functional documents as maps, charts, scientific drawings and military surveys. It was only rarely thought of as a way to make serious art.
Even the most ingenious watercolorist was considered a common draftsman before the turn of the century. His works, like most other kinds of drawings, were consigned to the darkness of a collector's private portfolio. Watercolors may have been beautiful enough to be relished in the drawing room or study. But they were considered too lightweight to be admitted to the exhibit hall.
Things changed rapidly during the first decades of the 1800s. And as demonstrated by the Muscarelle Museum's new show of British and Irish drawings and watercolors from the Ulster Museum in Belfast, the artists of the United Kingdom led the way. Prompted by the growing Romantic taste for open-air sketching and the natural landscape, they took up greatly improved pigments and papers and created an entirely new form of visual expression. The best, such as J.M.W. Turner, became masters at exploiting the medium's capacity for evoking atmosphere, color and light.
"Portraits and Prospects" traces the development of watercolors through nearly 300 years. Though the modern and contemporary pieces offer some pleasant surprises, it's the images from the early period that capture the eye.
First among these are two works by Paul Sandby, a topographical draftsman who became the most important watercolor landscapist of the 18th century. Sometimes known as "the father of English watercolor," he began his career in the military drawing office of the Tower of London. He later served as chief drawing master at the Royal Military Academy. But his artistic interests far outstripped the simple utilitarian records of fact associated with military draftsmanship.
"View near the Wood-Yard, Windsor Great Park" incorporates several of the majestic, fantastically gnarled beech trees for which Sandby became so famous. Both the large limbs and lesser branches of the closest pair snake through the air with barely restrained animation.
The picture overall, however, is remarkably straightforward and unidealized. Cows graze, children run and dogs bark just as they might on any sunny day in the park. Unlike his neoclassical predecessors who strived to elevate and improve the common scene, Sandby was content to let nature be nature. He doesn't worry too much about dressing his subject up.
Sandby's so-called "topographical" tradition flourished in the hands of such accomplished followers as Michael "Angelo" Rooker. But a second tradition sprang from the brush of another important artist, John Robert Cozens, before the 18th century closed.
Mute, brooding and melancholy - yet still rooted in the concrete details of what he saw - Cozens' paintings set him apart immediately from his matter-of-fact contemporaries.
"Capa di Bove," a view of a fortresslike landmark near Rome, can't be counted among the most spectacular of Cozens' Italian landscapes. But the hazy, mysterious scene does show how much atmosphere and tension he could create with a few strokes of gray and blue. This is the kind of landscape where you really can't see what you're feeling. But there's never any doubt that something important is there.
Cozens went insane in 1794. His romantic landscapes lived on, however, through a circle of painters headed by Cozens' friend and physician, Thomas Monro. Among the most promising of these artists was a young student named Joseph Mallord William Turner. Though he began by copying Cozens' works, his genius pushed the watercolor landscape to dizzying new heights within a few years.
"Beachy Head Looking Towards Newhaven," one of the "blue drawings" associated with his apprenticeship in the Monro school, shows Turner's early mastery of topographical mass and composition. He places the huge rocky outcrop up near the front of his picture - crowding the viewer's vantage point - and makes you look around its bulky mass to see the rest of the shoreline curling away toward the horizon.
In "Beeston Castle, Cheshire," a drawing from his middle period, Turner combines his talent for composition with an unprecedented level of experiment and sophistication.
By this time he was systematically rubbing, washing and scraping the surface of his works in search of ever more rare and evocative effects. The iridescent, golden blue sky he conjures up here is a particularly successful example.
* "Portraits and Prospects: British and Irish Drawings and Watercolors from the Collection of the Ulster Museum, Belfast" runs through March 4 at the Muscarelle Museum of Art, Jamestown Road, Williamsburg. Hours: 10 a.m.-4:45 p.m. Monday-Friday and noon-4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Free. Call 221-2703.