One comes to expect quality from the Tate Gallery and this book does not disappoint. It was produced to coincide with an exhibition at the Tate on the theme Watercolour. What surprised me was not the quality of the works...I expected that......but the fact that watercolour has always been regarded as the poor cousin to oil painting. And what's more there has always (well, seemingly always) been a gender bias. Watercolour was for women and oils for men.
Each section is introduced by a well developed and researched critique ranging from techniques to botanical and natural history, War-time records and modern use of water colour. Each section is clear and well documented. I learned a lot.
One of the things I learned was that a lot of the watercolours use other media such as pen and ink and gouache..or tempera. One of the stars of the Tate collection, of course is Turner with his misty enigmatic watercolours...but. as they point out, Turner was a lot more than just a watercolorist. He was a showman, an marketer extraordinaire, an innovator (as demonstrated with his experimental "colour beginnings" and he painted in oils to a great extent.
I thought that they might have had some of the works of Arthur Rackham but, I guess, his work is more pen and ink with watercolour washes rather than watercolour per se.
It was also interesting to note that for any purposes, watercolour was regarded as rather pedestrian...a tool for surveyors or military artists to record battlefields, or a way of recording injuries and plotting bodily reconstruction. Botanical artists and natural history artists have produced some astonishingly good likenesses of the originals but these have tended to be regarded as museum work and not true art.
The book, underlines the fact that there has been a constant struggle over what really constituted "art". With watercolorists being excluded from the grand art societies at various stages and some forms of the genre being in or out at various times.
If you were never able to get to the original exhibition (and I certainly was unable to see it). then this book is a great introduction to watercolour. (Though there is a very strong British bias, as one might expect: ...a couple of Chinese paintings produced by journeymen under instructions from English merchants...no Japanese art ..nothing from India and so on). ( )

This is the catalogue of the exhibition of watercolours which ran at Tate Britain from February to August 2011. The works displayed are intended to explore the wide variety of uses of the medium, from illuminated 13th.C. manuscripts to contemporary abstracts. There are displays of the different techniques of watercolourists in addition to the works themselves. As well as the comprehensive introduction by the chief curator, Alison Smith, there are general articles about the medium itself and the artists who have used it. There are also introductory essays to the various themes picked out in the exhibition. While the specialist reader might want more detail, for the interested non-specialist there appears to be more than enough information to gain a good grounding in the subject..

The colour reproductions are up to the high standard expected of Tate catalogues and about two-thirds of the exhibition's works are shown. I am sorry that the illustrations did not include Anish Kapoor's red and black untitled abstract, Matthew Paris's 13th.C. map of the British Isles and, particularly, one of Turner's - at his most impressionistic - Boats at Sea; just two vertical strokes of black and one of red on a white ground.

For the most part, this was not art to move the viewer emotionally but the pictures were well hung and the exhibition very informative. ( )