Water-colours are pigments prepared for the use of artists and others by mixing colouring substances in the state of fine powder with a soluble gum such as gum-arabic. These are made up in the form of small cakes, which are rubbed down with water and applied with a brush to paper, ivory, and some other materials. Moist water-colours are made up with honey or glycerine as well as gum, and are prepared so as to be kept in small earthenware pans or metallic tubes. Dry cakes require to be rubbed down with water on a glazed earthenware palette or slab, but moist colours can be mixed with water for use by the friction of a brush, so that the japanned lid of the box which contains them serves for a palette. The latter are accordingly very convenient for sketching from nature. The most important water-colour pigments are noticed under various heads which are given in the article PIGMENTS.
In water-colour painting two methods are employed; by one the artist works in transparent colours, by the other in opaque or body colours. In working by the latter method, which somewhat resembles oil-painting in its nature, Chinese white (see WHITE PIGMENTS) is mixed with light colours to give them body. Not only is there much artistic work done solely in transparent colours, but it is almost always these that are used for tinting mechanical drawings, maps, and the like. Some artists freely combine transparent, semi-transparent, and opaque colours. The quick drying of the water-colour pigments is favourable to rapid execution; and greater clearness is attained than is practicable in oils. In water-colour painting the texture of the paper employed is often of importance. Water-colour drawings are of course more easily injured by damp than oil-paintings.
WATER-COLOUR PAINTING, the most delicate of the graphic arts, is in an especial sense an English art. It was in England first that it attained to the dignity of a recognised artistic pursuit, and came to be—what it now is—admittedly the rival of oil-painting in brilliancy and power. It has had a large share in the modern prosperity of the fine arts, and of late has been practised by eminent artists in various countries, as France, Germany, and Austria.
In the illumination of missals water-colours were used mixed with the body white; and the same is true of the miniature-painting of the 18th century. Frescoes and painting in tempera were also in a sense works in water-colour. But the art of water-colour, as we now understand the term, had its origin in quite a different way. Dürer and certain of the German, Flemish, and Dutch artists were accustomed to outline drawings with a reed pen, and fill in those outlines with an auxiliary flat wash. Gradually the hard lines were replaced by touches with the brush, and the result was a monochrome in browns and grays, bistre or Indian ink. These again came to be tinted, and so suggested the full use of colours. Rembrandt often drew in brown, and added dashes of strong colour; and Rubens produced something very like modern water-colour drawings.
The modern art became emancipated from the old traditions by 'gradual disuse of the general shadow tint, and imitation of the local colour, not alone of the objects themselves, but of every modification resulting from light, dark, half-tint, or distance, a method which at once led to far greater truth and richness than could ever have been attained by merely passing colour over the universal shadow tint.' The stained drawing gradually gave way to the more perfect tinted drawing. But the tinted style predominated till 1790; and it may be said that the water-colours of the 18th century were tinted monochromes. It was in the 19th century that Girtin and Turner showed what scope and power there were in the art.
Artists who used the stained and tinted manner were Malton (1726-1801), Paul Sandby, R.A. (1725-1809), often called, though without justification, 'the father of water-colour art'; also, all in the last half of the 18th century, Grimm, Webber, Clevely, Pars, and Rooker. Wheatley, Westall, and Gilpin used water-colour as well as oil. Rowlandson, Cristall, Hills, Wright, Mortimer, Gresse, Hearne, J. R. Cozens, and Dayes greatly promoted the growing art. Nicholas Pocock (1749-1831) displayed a new richness and force. John Smith (Warwick Smith) first got beyond the weakness of mere tinting. Thomas Girtin (1775-1802) attained great richness of tone and breadth; his compositions were grand but simple; he massed light and shade in broad and sometimes abrupt forms. J. M. W. Turner (q.v.; 1775-1851) soon distanced all his predecessors and contemporaries, and in his hands water-colour painting became a new art. He wholly abandoned preliminary tinting; minute details are imitated in local colour; his work is marked by breadth, fullness, warmth as well as grace. Other more or less important names are those of Delamotte, Varley, J. J. Chalon, A. E. Chalon, Samuel Prout, Peter de Wint, Liverseege, Cotman, David Cox, Essex, Richardson, Newton, Bonington, Copley Fielding, Robson, W. Hunt, Ross, Harding, Cattermole, Holland, Penley, Lewis, Houghton, and Pinwell; more recent are Birket Foster, Sir John Gilbert, &c.
The Society of Painters in Water-colours was instituted in 1804; it held its first exhibition in 1805; and its annual exhibitions are now as crowded as those of the Royal Academy. Formal recognition of its dignity was accorded in 1882, when the society obtained a charter, and became the Royal Society of Painters in Water-colours. There are other similar associations, as the Institute of Painters in Water-colours. An admirable collection illustrative of the history of the art may be studied in the South Kensington Museum.
For the history of water-colour painting, see the article PAINTING (p. 698); Redgrave's Introduction to the Catalogue of Water-colours at South Kensington (1877), and his son's Water-colour Painting in England (1892); Hamerton's Graphic Arts (1882); Cosmo Monkhouse, The Early English Water-colour Painters (1889); and J. L. Roget, History of the 'Old Water-colour' Society (2 vols. 1891).