What role do collectors and connoisseurs play in shaping the public's understanding of an art form? An Eye for Beauty: Collectors and the History of British Watercolor examines precisely that question. This exhibition presents more than 100 watercolors by the greatest masters of the medium, including J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, John Robert Cozens, and Thomas Girtin, drawn from the collections of The Huntington and the Courtauld Institute Gallery in London. The exhibit also includes superb works by artists better known for their accomplishments in other media, such as oil painter David Wilkie, as well as paintings by important artists like John "Warwick" Smith and Francis Towne, who were relatively unknown until "discovered" by collectors. Many of these works have never before been exhibited in the United States.

An Eye for Beauty explores the history of British watercolor as it was defined by early 20th-century scholars such as Laurence Binyon (1869-1943) and Martin Hardie (1875-1952), from its beginnings in 16th-century portrait and topographical drawings through what has often been called its "golden age," the early 19th century, when emotive works by Romantic artists like Turner, Girtin, Peter De Wint, and David Cox defined the standard of excellence by which we still measure the art form today. These men were connoisseurs, individuals qualified to act as critical judges of art because of their understanding of its formal beauty, techniques and compositional principles. This exhibition looks at the history of British watercolor through the lens of their connoisseurship and judgments, which helped establish the canon of great British watercolor artists.

While greatness is defined in different ways for individual artists, a common theme in connoisseurship is the appreciation of technique. The connoisseurs believed that the greatest practitioners of watercolor were those who most skillfully turned its unique properties to advantage, demonstrating an ability to manipulate color suspended in a drop of water into a distant mountain, or a white patch of paper into a shaft of light. Collectors valued the idea that the medium of watercolor allowed artists to capture images of the world around them more quickly and spontaneously than was possible with oil paint. The transparent, luminous quality of watercolor lent itself equally well to the distinctive effects of the light on English hillsides and moorlands, the bright sunlight of the southern European landscape, and the melodramatic mood of Alpine scenery. British artists found watercolor suitable for a wide range of diverse subject matter. For example, Peter De Wint captured the feeling of a vast space bathed in golden light with a few careful brushstrokes in his English landscape scene, Chichester. Rather than focus on the countryside he passed through in his travels, Scottish artist David Wilkie used watercolor to create on-the-spot portraits of the people he encountered, such as Madame Josephine, Landlady of the Casa Giuseppina. And John "Warwick" Smith pictures the sublimity of nature in his watercolor of the mountainous landscape of Italy, On the Side of Lake Lugano.

The greatest number of objects in this exhibition comes from two collections assembled in the mid twentieth century in Britain by William Spooner and Gilbert Davis. Spooner, a successful engineer, and his wife Mercie began collecting seriously from the time of their marriage in 1938. Their collection of 100 outstanding watercolors was bequeathed to the Courtauld Institute in 1967. A wealthy bachelor, Davis assembled nearly 2,000 drawings over a fifteen-year period, in the 1940s and early 1950s, working through London art dealers. He later married, and sold the main part of his collection to The Huntington, establishing the institution as one of the greatest repositories of British watercolor outside the United Kingdom. An Eye for Beauty is designed to highlight these two great collections. It also brings its focus on collecting into more recent times, when museums and private collectors have expanded the canon to include modern artists, among them Walter Sickert and Gwen John.

Exhibition Tours:

Docent-led tours of the exhibition, An Eye for Beauty (February 12 - May 15, 2005), are available for groups of 10 or more by advance registration.

Tour times: 10:30 a.m. Tuesday through Friday, and 9 a.m. on Saturdays.

Cost: $20 per person, including admission. Prepayment required.

Reservations: Please call the Group Sales office at (626) 405-2240, or e-mail tours@huntington.org