Event Item: 00032

Great British Watercolors at the Yale Center for British Art

Exhibition: 11th Jul 2007 to 30th Sep 2007

Source: http://www.vmfa.state.va.us

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts will present Great British Watercolors from the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art, a major loan exhibition, as part of Celebrating Paul Mellon, a year-long celebration of the centenary of the birth of one of its most important benefactors, the late Paul Mellon.

Great British Watercolors brings together 88 outstanding watercolors from the collection of Paul Mellon, including masterpieces by J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), John Constable (1776-1837), William Blake (1757-1827), Paul Sandby (1730/1-1809), Thomas Girtin (1775-1802) and Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), according to Dr. Mitchell Merling, VMFA's Paul Mellon Curator and Head of the Department of European Art.

"In all, 45 artists will be represented in a show that will span approximately 100 years - from the emergence of watercolor painting in the mid-18th century to its high point in the late-19th century," he says. "This is a major exhibition that investigates a historically important technique - a medium that was for a time greatly underappreciated. Through his patronage, Paul Mellon helped initiate a reassessment of this demanding technique."

The exhibition will highlight what Merling calls "the extraordinary diversity of British watercolor painting, showcasing both landscape and figurative works by some of the principal artists who worked in the medium."

The Yale Center for British Art (YCBA), which was established by Paul Mellon (Yale '29) and filled with works from his private collection, houses more than 20,000 drawings and watercolors and the largest and most representative collection of British art on paper outside the United Kingdom. Together with VMFA and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., it is one of the three primary art institutions in the U.S. to benefit from of Mellon's philanthropy, which was international in scope. Mellon, who died at the age of 91 in February 1999, was one of the greatest 20th-century collectors of British art.

"His feeling for British art blossomed when he served on the committee for the groundbreaking 1960 VMFA exhibition 'Sport and the Horse' and met the art historian Basil Taylor," Merling says.

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 200 North Boulevard, Richmond, Virginia