John Sell Cotman was a watercolourist and etcher who was born in Norwich, England in May 1782.
He left Norwich at the tender age of 16 to study in London, where he became a member of Dr Monro’s circle and met the painters J.M.W. Turner and Thomas Girtin (both of whom we have previously featured on this website).
Despite having very little formal training in art, by 1800 he was already exhibiting watercolours at the annual Royal Academy exhibition and between 1800 and 1805, he produced some of his best work. In fact his paintings from this period, including the celebrated ‘Greta Bridge’ (circa 1805) are considered to be amongst the finest English landscape paintings of the time as they include some great examples of the classic English watercolour technique and show remarkable boldness and sureness of hand.
Greta Bridge
Unfortunately his work did not bring him much success at the time, so in 1806 he returned to Norwich, where he became one of the the most important representatives of the Norwich School. His work not only depicted the local scenery but also that of France, where he made several trips to and his style of painting in his later years became much more flamboyant. It is thought that he mixed flour or rice paste with his watercolours to produce an effect similar to that of oil painting. In fact, during his career, he did also use the medium of oil to paint in, but this area of his work has definitely been overshadowed by his great achievement as a watercolourist.
In 1834 he moved back to London where he became professor of drawing at King’s College which he was delighted with as he was struggling to make a living at this time just through his paintings and he had found himself in debt.
He held this position at King’s College until his death in July 1842 and for most of the twentieth century, John Sell Cotman even surpassed Turner’s popularity as being the most widely admired English watercolourist.
Kandisky was born in Moscow in 1866 but spent most of his childhood in Odessa. Music played an important part in his early life (both his parents played instruments and he also learnt how to play the piano and cello) and this would become an inspiration for some of his later watercolor work, as is apparent from the names of the paintings such as Improvisations, Impressions and Compositions.
Kandisky was an active participant in several of the most influential and controversial art movements of the 20th century, including the Blue Rider which he founded along with Franz Marc and the Bauhaus. His reputation also became firmly established in the United States and as soon as his work was introduced to Solomon Guggenheim, he became one of Kandisky’s most enthusiastic supporters.
Sargent painted more than 2,000 watercolors during his career and of many different subjects and landscapes, from the English countryside to Venice to the Middle East and North Africa and Montana, Maine, and Florida in the States. He is particularly noted for the hundreds of watercolors of Venice which he created, many of which were done from the perspective of a gondola. In the Middle East and North Africa, Sargent painted bedouins, fishermen and goatherds and the watercolors he produced in the last decade of his life in Maine and Florida mainly featured fauna, flora, and native people.
America and a dominant figure in American art.
He stayed in England between 1881 and 1882 in a small fishing village on the North Sea coast and it was here that he began doing scenes which were harsher in tone, such as people struggling heroically in landscape and his work here was almost exclusively in watercolor.