‘Impressions in Watercolour: JMW Turner and his Contemporaries’
Towner Eastbourne, 23 October 2025–12 April 2026
Ian Warrell, Impressions in Watercolour: Turner and his contemporaries, Pallas Athene, 2025, £35, pb, pp176, 90 col ISBN 9781843682646
Julian Freeman
‘Impressions in Watercolour’ should receive a warm reception in Eastbourne following success at its original venue, The Holbourne Museum, Bath, for the medium has proved enduring and attractive in Sussex, and the exhibition’s excellence, size and curatorial range combine to celebrate Turner’s 250th birthday year with a flourish. The pictures are sourced almost entirely from a single private owner, clearly a collection formed with great care over time, and its cohesion is evident, impressive and strongly communicated from the start. It isn’t wishful thinking to suggest that the works on the walls look as though they were intended to be seen together, and the complete absence of Turner’s larger oils should deter no-one: rather, it enables a wide audience to get to grips with the exhibition’s subject – Turner’s brilliance as an experimental watercolourist – with enthusiasm.
The paintings are mostly finished watercolours and notebook studies dating roughly from the early 1800s until the later 1840s, with subjects ranging from Scotland to Germany and Switzerland. Together, they are a powerful demonstration of his ability to think (and paint) on the spot, and are excellently contextualised by the different effects such activity had upon the work of on his contemporaries, upon several of those who followed hard on his heels, and in still later generations. The exhibition easily occupies the entirety of Towner’s vast upper floor, sensitively augmented by several key exhibits from the gallery’s own collection, to form a well-paced, imposing and engaging display, hung at a comfortable height in carefully considered spaces against muted background colours.
Yet to say that ‘Impressions’ is an absorbing and beautifully curated exhibition is almost a throwaway comment. Its balance becomes quickly evident as each successive work is inspected. From the start, clear and intelligible captioning sets the tone, allowing the entire experience unfold as a sequence in which a succession of frissons creates a memorable and provocative resource for a wide-ranging audience. This kind of show, where familiar and unfamiliar works rub shoulders harmoniously, and which prompt prior learning and visual recall, is a rarity that should not go unremarked by serious gallery-goers in south-east England, and the opportunity it provides for students of all ages to chart (and refresh) a discrete swathe of the evolution of 18th- and 19th-century British watercolour painting shouldn’t be missed.
The curatorial emphasis on Context is both welcome and essential, and it is simply provided in clear captions that not only offer background information, but invite newer (and ‘newer’ can mean ‘younger’ or ‘unknowing’) audiences to gain greater clarity concerning what may seem to have been the strangeness of Turner’s own achievements. They highlight what he and his contemporaries represented to audiences in their own era, often very differently.
The fact that in the 18th and earlier 19th centuries landscape painting in watercolours was not necessarily deemed the highest of the arts may seem to have been at odds with the competitive approach to the medium adopted by its practitioners. Turner’s own apocryphal statement that ‘… if Tom [Girtin] had lived I should have starved’ is quoted early, on a caption accompanying a Girtin of Windsor Park (c1798), but the quality of a spread of work by quite different authors conveys rivalry easily enough to show those less familiar with this type of work the importance of pencil drawing in the construction of watercolours, and the differences between such studied approaches and what Turner so often achieved using little more than mark-making and the finest of brush tips.
1 A boat near a buoy in a rough sea by JMW Turner (1775–1851), c1830. Private collection. Photo Fisheye Images
Those seeking to compare Turner with others from the start of the show will quickly encounter De Wint and Henry George Hine keeping company with Turner’s A Boat near a Bouy in a Rough Sea (Pl 1) and others, although throughout the exhibition works by John Sell Cotman are a notable presence for their technical differences, in both draughtsmanship and paint handling, as seen against Turner’s own, and those by his contemporaries: Cotman’s Bedlam Furnace (1802) and The New Bridge, Durham (1805) are but two examples that show him at his best, and are markers that denote the early 19th century as a time of significant change, in painting and indeed, in every field of endeavour.
Turner’s prolific and expressive work in watercolours in sketchbook form is an arresting, possibly over-familiar, presence that can be too easily accepted, but viewers need only examine the dates within which most of these studies were executed to begin to understand the energy that Turner continually brought to this practice between 1830 and the mid-1840s. That he was an inveterate traveller is now an accepted fact, but his wanderlust was a factor in alterations to his technique and palette during this period, and examples of this are manifest here. Some features, for example, the striking brilliance of areas of colour and other marks on small sheets of paper, such as Evening Figures on a beach (Pl 2), are strikingly ‘modern’, and should serve today’s students as telling examples of the vital importance of sketchbooks, in and out of the studio.
2 Evening: figures on a beach by JMW Turner, c1835-40. Private collection. Photo Fisheye Images
‘Impressions’ usefully includes 19th-century watercolours from Towner’s own collection – among them several by Turner – and so permits some themes in the exhibition to be usefully nuanced, not least because bequests are only one way to influence the different ways in which bodies of work in public ownership has been ‘grown’, throughout the 20th century and into the present. Eastbourne’s own geographical location and resort status is a useful example of these continuing changes. Its very position to some extent delayed the arrival of a gallery until the 20th century but, once the Towner bequest was established, the English Channel and the South Downs continued as subject-matter, to play important roles in reflecting different local, visual preferences and tendencies in the exhibition of 19th- and early 20th-century art, encompassing and then enriching purely pastoral and marine painting. In this, Turner, his contemporaries and their followers were not only integral in their own time, but for decades were abiding presences, and arguably remain so, for reasons that continue to require the visual and contemporaneous registration of swiftly altering imagery, reflections of every type.