Great British Watercolors

"In a period of a little over fifteen years, beginning in the early 1960s, Paul Mellon (1907-1999) assembled one of the world's greatest collections of British drawings and watercolors. As part of his extensive collecting of British art, he purchased several distinguished private collections of British watercolors, enriching and expanding them with purchases reflecting his own taste." "This catalogue of an exhibition celebrating the centenary of Paul Mellon's birth features eighty-eight outstanding watercolors from the fifty thousand works of art on paper with which he endowed the Yale Center for British Art. The selection spans roughly the hundred years from the emergence of watercolor painting in the mid-eighteenth century to its apogee in the mid-nineteenth. These works highlight the diversity of British watercolor painting, showcasing both landscape and figurative subjects by some of the principal artists working in the medium, including Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Rowlandson, William Blake, J.M.W. Turner, and John Constable."--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.