Gainsborough to Ruskin

Although engraved by W. F. Wells and published by Wells and Laporte on 1 January 1805, this drawing actually belongs to Gainsborough's Suffolk period of the early to mid-1750s, when his subjects were chiefly woodland scenes, with pools or streams, winding tracks, and cottages nestled among trees. Withered or pollarded trees, especially the latter, which lent themselves so well to rococo treatment, were also familiar motifs.

This drawing is yet another example of Gainsborough's technique in wash and oil and must also date from the 1770s. The coat of varnish used to fix the drawing has yellowed, giving a golden tone to the work.

This brilliant chalk landscape is typical of Gainsborough's work in the early 1780s, the majority of which consists of rapid sketches of imaginary compositions done mostly as recreation. His style became increasingly sketchy, brilliant, and forceful. The Morgan's collection of twenty-five drawings by Gainsborough is of high quality, mostly coming from the Fairfax Murray collection that Pierpont Morgan bought en bloc in 1910.

This landscape was executed in watercolor and oil and then varnished to resemble a painting. The artist began experimenting with this unusual technique in the early 1770s and exhibited a series of ten drawings at the Royal Academy in 1772. Here the blocklike ruins, whose sole raison d'être seems to be their shape and whiteness, are balanced by the thick white highlights on the vase and pedestal, horse cart, and reclining figures.

For tourists in the Romantic era, Melrose Abbey had many of the same charms as Tintern Abbey as well as the additional allure of its scenic location in the Scottish Border Country. Sir Walter Scott advised visitors to view by moonlight the "broken arches" of the abbey, which provided local color in his wildly popular Border ballad The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Ruined abbeys frequently figure in the watercolors of Thomas Girtin, who made several sketching tours in this region.

This pen and ink drawing was the design for the frontispiece of Malton's A Compleat Treatise on Perspective in Theory and Practice of 1776. The drawing has been chalked on the back and gone over with a stylus to transfer the design to an engraving plate; highly finished, it shows the flawless, uniform coverage possible with the early wash technique.

Boys met the artist Richard Parkes Bonington (1801–1828) in Paris in 1825. It was apparently Bonington who persuaded Boys to abandon engraving and take up painting. Boys absorbed Bonington's manner of painting and his sense of color. He used touches of pure red to enliven the cool palette of this landscape.

This is one of the drawings Boys made on his tour of Wales in 1858 and 1859; he exclusively exhibited Welsh views at the New Water-Colour Society at this time.

William Marlow visited France and Italy in 1765 and 1766. Like Richard Wilson and other British landscape artists, he was profoundly affected by his brief Italian experience; Italian subjects dominated his exhibited work after 1767. This delightful watercolor is probably an imaginary view inspired by his Italian travels.

William Turner was apprenticed to John Varley and elected an associate of the Old Water-Colour Society at age eighteen. In 1811 he settled in Oxford, where he lived for the rest of his life teaching drawing. His landscapes are generally open, distant views with a smooth, meticulous technique and an almost supernatural stillness.