Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/651

In England. 621 4. Early English Water-colour Painters. At the close of the eighteenth century the art of Water- colour Painting, properly so called (now carried to such great perfection by British artists), was first practised in England. Water colours had long been employed by miniature painters and illuminators; but their use for large and important works was mainly due to the efforts of the book illustrators, who worked for the enthusiastic antiquaries of the close of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, and strove to give, with such means as they had at their disposal, faithful deline- ations of the scenes described in their patrons' works. To John Robert Cozens (1752 — 1799) is due the honour of first raising landscape painting in water colours to the position of an independent art. Redgrave says in his ■ Century of Painters,' " his works go little beyond light and shade and suggestion of colour, but they are full of poetry. There is a solemn grandeur in his Alpine views ; a sense of vastness and a tender tranquillity in his pictures that stamp him as a true artist ; a master of atmospheric effects, he seems fully to have appreciated the value of mystery." The fine collection of English water-colour drawings at the South Kensington Museum contains three works by Cozens. A great cotemporary of him, Paul Sandby (1725 — 1809), who painted in solid opaque tempera colours as well as in water colours, is well represented there by four character- istic works, which very distinctly betray the influence of Cozens. Others who contributed to lay the foundations of our great school of water-colour painting were William Payne