 I'm going to give you a little introduction to the exhibition to begin with and then what we're going to do is Rachel and I have selected works within the gallery that we're going to talk about both in terms of their history as art objects, but also as their history as physical objects that were made in a certain way with certain materials and with certain techniques and that's where Rachel's expertise is really fundamental to how we understand what watercolor is all about. The Brooklyn Museum owns one of the most important collections of American watercolors in the country and it was begun very early at the turn of the century. What we try to do is once every ten years put on a major exhibition that draws from this collection because most of the time these works are not on permanent view and Rachel will speak a little to why that is the case. Each time we do the watercolor exhibition we try to have a different focus and this time we decided to do landscapes very specifically in part because they cover the whole range of watercolor production in this collection from the late 18th century that is the late 1700s to the mid 20th century and the latest works in this exhibition are from the 1950s. Watercolor emerged as a fine art in the practice of landscape painting. Before landscape became a professionalized genre for artists watercolor was used as a study medium and not as a medium for finished works of high standing and when landscape began to be practiced as a more formalized genre in the late 1700s and gradually gained more respect among artists watercolor was a key medium in part because of its portability and the fact that artists going out into the field would take these portable supplies with them and be able to create their works on the spot or at least begin them on the spot. Watercolor in America very much followed in the pathway of watercolor in Great Britain because that was where it was first professionalized to the point of being exhibited annually in major exhibitions by major artists and this occurred in the 18 teens and 20s and it was very much the influence of watercolor in Britain that shaped watercolor art in this country. What we're going to do now is talk about this really amazing case of objects that are all materials used for watercolor practice and they're all almost all from the 19th century so Rachel I'm going to just let you jump in. Thank you. I want to explain a few things as Terry said in this case and also tell you really just very basically what watercolor is. Some of you probably know very well but basically watercolor is pigment particles suspended in water and with an addition of a binder called gum Arabic and right there if you can see these kind of amber little round lumps here and on a glass tray that's the gum Arabic. The gum Arabic serves two purposes. It actually sticks the pigment to the paper and it also keeps the pigment particles suspended in water so they can actually have a chance to wash across the paper rather than just sink immediately. You see a few different watercolor sets here in the from Renaissance basically from medieval excuse me to Renaissance times artists had to grind and refine their own pigments which was quite laborious process. It was something they had to be trained in to do and kind of beginning in the late 18th century the Colorman trade really maybe even earlier in that the Colorman trade was was kind of being developed and the Colorman would develop these materials for the artist including canvases and stretchers and pigments and supply them to the artist so this was kind of a great boon to the using watercolor for as amateur use they didn't have to to go through that whole process. In the late 18th century they realized that if they added honey to the to the watercolor the gum and the pigment and the and the and the water that the cakes were much easier to use they and these this was done in 1775 by a man named Reeves and this he's actually the Reeves company still in business today and he was able to make water colors into cakes and these are called dry cakes and what the artist would do is they would dip the cakes into water and then they would take like maybe a porcelain tray and they would rub it up into a wash so that was one development the next development was by Windsor Newton in 1830 where they were actually added something called glycerin it's like a syrupy form of alcohol and this would keep the the colors moist and they would pour them into these porcelain pans and they would dry and they so they would also call pan colors but this was the very first time that artists could actually dip their brush with water onto the pan and use it directly so this made it much much easier even more so than the dry cakes for artists to take their supplies outdoors and start to work that way so it was very important the color man as a kind of an instrument in the development of watercolor I wanted to mention one other so what you see here actually our moist colors probably this and there's a small tin over here in the middle are our drawing instruments crayons etc and in say 1846 about 15 years after moist colors were developed the Windsor Newton developed tube colors so they had to add even more glycerin so you could squeeze them out of a tube but this was important because artists would kind of squeeze the paint right out of the tube and to for opaque highlights so it was a whole different way of working and so keep that in mind as we as we go through the show we're going to show you examples of more opaque opaque working in 1834 Windsor Newton also developed a new white that the artists could use what happened is lead white which was commonly used for oil painting was known to darken in atmospheric pollution with hydro sulfuric acid and that would come from coal tar that was being burned especially in England and London the time and so they knew that this would darken their their paintings so they Chinese white was zinc white was known but Windsor Newton was able to refine it and make it so that watercolors could now use it in wash and so this also was added to pigments and made the use of opaque painting possible then we're going to see examples of that as well we're going to double back now to the beginning of the show we're going to head to the corner of the gallery over here to look at the earliest work in the exhibition this is the earliest work in the exhibition is from 1777 it's by William Peary who was actually a member of the British Army and came here as part of their posts in the colonies and he was an exceptional water colorist but this is someone who would have been trained as part of his army training he would have taken art courses because these watercolors were very much akin to mapping they were strategic images that military artists would do once they came to this country or were sent on any kind of expedition you know we don't we're used to just sending people out with digital cameras now to bring back images of a place that were accurate one cent artists who were trained to represent what they were seeing now I think one of the things you notice right off is it's not a terribly colorful image and the reason is because this participates in the very early use of watercolor and in that era the range of colors was fairly limited and also the use of washes really was keyed into the notion of transparency and watercolor in its earliest years in England was very much about transparency and manipulating washes that were not opaque we'll see as we move through time that opaqueness becomes a real bone of contention at various points in terms of watercolor so I'm going to ask Rachel to what's interesting about this piece as Terry mentioned it's got these very kind of grayish tonalities partly because of the materials that were available for washes at the time but also watercolor manuals were extreme were extremely prolific at the time especially this time and they were recommending for these exact topographical and landscape views the use of these gray tints this is what they thought was best and appropriate and they would recommend even specific pigments was a recommended price something like this would be blue and red and yellow together to make something like this and also another really interesting point about this piece which is different than any other piece in the show is that it's on what's called a traditional laid paper if you can see I don't know when you get you can come closer there's a rectilinear pattern there's these horizontal lines and vertical lines you see from a traditional laid paper laid that's laid just in case you haven't heard it used as a paper term right and it's kind of it's it's created when the as the sheet is formed on the surface of the paper mold but anyway when I went to here in the late 18th century artists were kind of seeking different kinds of papers this wasn't really suiting their purposes with these ridges and all and so at the time James Wattman in the late 18th century really mid to late 18th century developed something called a woe paper where he was able to manipulate the screen that they make paper on so that you wouldn't get these ridges and so watercolors were really thrilled with this development. Another thing that he developed which was instrumental in the development of watercolour along with Chinese way of the time along with woe paper was the fact that he developed a unique hard sizing for paper what had happened is after the paper was made it was then dipped in a tub of gelatin often and that kind of imparted a certain strength and filled in spaces and also allowed people to write on paper so it wouldn't kind of be absorbed and spread right into the paper and that had normally been kind of a thin sizing but in Wattman's case he developed a very hard sizing in this way watercolors were able to use water on their paper and manipulate it take water off do wet and to wet sponging and blotting and all these kinds of techniques that we're going to kind of show you now and which they really couldn't have done without it. I mean watercolors also you know throughout the centuries have used all kinds of paper and you'll see that too but this was really the most popular paper that watercolors used. Rachel and I have chosen this work by James Beck to show you the whole beginnings of opaque pigments and how the sort of denseness of opaque colors changed the way watercolors looked and what artists were able to do. You'll notice compared to this little watercolor this is a much more elaborate composition this is by an English trained artist who came and worked in the United States in the 1790s very much in the Mid-Atlantic States in Pennsylvania in particular this is a view in Philadelphia believe it or not and his composition is fairly more advanced in terms of a receding space this V form your eye is led in by this river and the sky is really very beautifully delineated and there are many more actual details if you look here you're not the closer you get you're not going to see more detail to a great degree but here the artist has used opaque color to describe for example the foam on the water going over this little falls and the heavier whiteness in the clouds so I want to talk about opacity Rachel. Yeah I'm going to contradict myself right away and talk about how important paper is because in this case paper is not important at all the paper is completely covered by this opaque paint and and as Terry said you know kind of to emulate oil painting and to give you more that feel in fact this is mounted to canvas which is mounted to a stretcher which we'll talk a little bit about too as we'll see further examples of how these things were mounted like oil paintings but in this case unlike the transparent technique which we're going to see is this was built up you would start with your darks and you would build up your pigments to you got to your very lightest color so that's a big difference with the opaque style and that is that is the method in oil and so what you had water colorists doing at various periods in time were either choosing to exploit the real features of water color or contrary to that using water color in a way that was more oil painting like to achieve oil painting effects and you're going to see this go back and forth there's like a pendulum that swings as to what's really desirable in England for example during the 1820s there was a real contention between water colors who regarded themselves as purists you know using washes and those who were using opaque colors should we say a word about that one or you ready for that yeah I just one thing I wanted to kind of point to is the use of the tube colors in this case was very also useful for artists to be able to do this so the development of those in the in 1840s was very important that helped them do this a lot and also they in this one back this is an example of where he added a lot of Chinese white or chalk white or what we call body it would add a body to the to the pigment and that's why these are often called body colors or wash so I'm just kind of wanted to introduce that term with you here a lot they're not different body color and wash well wash refers to a broader term where watercolors are opaquely painted or thickly painted it could include body color body color really refers very specifically to usually an art white added to it yeah you may see other people saying different things oh it's an important question yeah yeah I mean I think this this water color is really the antithesis of this one this the the what the paper is primary that's the one of the most important aspects of the materials and the artist here has gone from light washes here too dark and then which is very typical of the transparent technique where you the composition is built up with with layers and layers of thin washes and the the darks either sometimes white highlights or reds were added very at the very end but the the pure white highlights are really the used from the paper itself the paper excuse me the paper serves as the way and we're in the 1920 the 1820s now which is the beginning of the Hudson River School and the sort of blossoming of this country's native landscape school but initially it was British artists coming here and doing watercolors on which engravings were based in publications an artist like William Guy wall wall in particular who came and did a serial set of views that were then engraved as prints and then bound in portfolios and sold it was one of the ways in which American landscape was popularized but what's interesting is that the early Hudson River School painters in it like Cole and church very seldom used watercolors themselves it was still a time in this country where there was a separation between those considered fine artists that is to say oil painters or sculptors and those considered practical artists and for a very long time and well into the mid 19th century you had watercolors characterized as either illustrators or commercial artists or artists preparing imagery for use as prints and it's only going to be after the Civil War era that water color really is raised in terms of its stature and and the level of its respect one of the are you done with that one you know as you walk by this you may want to kind of notice how the artist has manipulated the washes he's kind of probably wet the paper and blotted off some color to create highlights as well and maybe sponge tear a little bit you might just want to take a look as you walk by now having talked about commercial artists one of the really interesting pieces in the show is by a woman who was known as Fanny Palmer her name is Francis Palmer and she was one of the very few women who produced imagery for reproduction as prints by courier knives and she was highly successful in her career and this is one of the images it happens to be of the Samuel Fleet homestead which was indeed in Brooklyn when I look at this I'm interested in the level of detail how this was a very literal image and the fact that she was able to use a very precise touch it fits into a kind of scene painting genre that was very popular at mid-century and when Rachel looks at it she sort of gravitates to a very different element yeah it's condition yeah I mean what's interesting about this is she's really combined and really matured the full watercolor technique is there's washes used in the background it's built up but there's opaque areas where body color or wash is used opaque you know think she's also used in these darker areas it's it's kind of hard to see but in the horses and the coachman and some of the brown areas she's actually added a layer of gum Arabic on top to add saturation to the to the pigment and I think that's really kind of in the imitation of oil or what you would want to feel out of oil this kind of translucency and saturation and depth of color but also what to me is most notable about this is a stark area in the center of the piece some of you all can notice that but this piece again was probably put on a strainer a wooden strainer and the paper was stretched over it and it was placed in a frame the way an oil painting would be presented and what may have happened was they're often using backings to support the paintings in the back and there might have been a wood backing on the back which is acidic and can stain paper and so it's something we're very attuned to in the museum is housing housing these pieces with the appropriate materials that are not acidic and that will not stain or hurt the paper and so which was not as well known at this time so for all of you who have works on paper or watercolor at home and you wanted to fill out that space in the frame and you stuck in a nice handy piece of cardboard from an old box take the cardboard out right Rachel and you'll avoid having this kind of darkened shadow on your image and that's you have to when you're backing things you must use acid-free backing and archival matting and that's just a little word of warning we're going to go over to the other corner now and move into mid-century you may notice right off that this work is presented differently by us physically because there's no mat okay you just have a frame going all the way up to the edge of the image this is indeed this is the first watercolor American watercolor to come into the museum's collection it was a gift in 1906 actually the bequest of a very important a Brooklyn collector Caroline Paul Hemis and she had a very large collection that included watercolors and it was presented after her death to the museum this work is by Alfred Fitch Bellows is one of the most outspoken proponents of watercolor in the 1860s and 1870s and what he tried to do on behalf of American artists was to raise the profile of watercolor to prove that it was not only a really ambitious medium but one that was suitable for important projects by major artists and one that was durable as well so there are a couple of things that bellows did a few I'll mention and then Rachel will speak more to the technique the size of the watercolor was much enlarged and these were called exhibition watercolors they were prepared specifically for annual exhibitions by the Society of American Watercolorists which was formed in 1866 and had its first exhibition in 1867 and the subjects were intended to be like the kind of subjects that were then popular among oil painters you'll also notice that this is a fairly opaque use of watercolor and more to the point from my perspective it's one that is highly detailed there aren't a lot of areas of really really broad watery washes where detail is unimportant and you'll see again this is one of those major shifts especially in the 1860s opacity becomes more important detail becomes more important and in this period it's all because watercolorists want to compete with oil painters in a very very active deliberate way yeah it's interesting as you're talking about the size of the sheet that's the color meant this time and James Wattman were making papers of many different sizes for the artist and able to do that so this was in response to the artist request probably this as Terry said is framed with without a mat and I was just mentioning over there that proper housing is very important in the preservation of watercolors they're very sensitive to acid materials and atmospheric pollutants in the air that come through and so in this one we have placed it against a ragboard mat but instead in lieu of the window mat we've put in these matboard spacers and what this does is this keeps the water color from pressing against the glazing or in this case it's an acrylic of plexiglass and which is it which isn't good for the piece if it was touching so that's that's our way of kind of of ensuring that if it did touch it can in a moist environment it could mold could grow or it could fair type or change the the surface of the paint yeah I mean in in a museum we try not to have moist environments we have very controlled relative humidity and temperature but this is just a further precaution where you wouldn't want something pressed against the glass so we just do it that way what's also interesting about this piece is that there is discoloration on the back which indicates this was also mounted on a wooden strainer unlike the Palmer and like the Beck so you know again it kind of points to the the whole presentation these pieces as oil a strainer generally it's kind of a wooden it's about two inches thick generally and it's a rectangle on the back and the pieces is done on paper sometimes it's then mounted overall to canvas which is stretched around the strainer on the back it's a way to kind of mount the pieces sometimes it's not mounted on the canvas sometimes it's just the paper which is stretched on the back and often because these wooden strainers they are well they're made of wood and as I said they're acidic they can cause damage to the paper so when these things have been restored in the past they've often cut off these the paper margins which were pulled around the back or the canvas but we see still on the back this you know kind of discoloration the paper which clues us into the fact that that it once you know was present we're just going to move down the wall a little bit another important development for watercolor in the 1860s was a movement called the American Pre-Raphaelites this is a group of artists who were followers of the aesthetics of John Ruskin who was a British artist and theorist and critic very vocal and prolific writer about art and he promoted art that was very much a mirror of nature down to the finest details and what he believed was that the closer one came to detailing nature the closer one came to achieving a sort of rapport with the divine that this was one way of expressing God's creation and that detail was essential to creating a work that had a kind of moral value and watercolor happened to be the most favored medium among these artists in part because most of them worked out of doors on plein air most of them valued the effects of natural light as opposed to studio light most of them chose to use really pure and brilliant colors that were applied in a very different way in part one technique was called stippling and Rachel will talk a little bit about some of the other techniques of Pre-Raphaelites it was a fairly short lived movement most of these artists had finished working in this vein by the 1870s or mid 1870s in part because every object was so time consuming to produce one of the best examples of American Pre-Raphaelite is a work in the front room that you can look at again before you leave the exhibition and it's another work by John Henry Hill who was one of the leaders of this movement and you can see the extraordinary painstaking detail virtually every little touch is made with the tiniest brushes some of their brushes had just three or four hairs on them and it was a way of achieving the kind of visual exactitude and truth to nature that they valued in this case hill is used a combination of techniques he's really used some broad washes for the background and then he's kind of laid these more washy areas side by side rather than overlapping in the area of the of the arch and then down here he's really fully taken on as Terry was saying this stipple technique where he lays kind of each dry stroke side by side and and you can really see that here in the foreground and in this case we're saying that Wattman had made these papers especially for use for watercolors he would also made a range of textures often they kind of range from hot press which is a smooth paper to a cold press or rough paper and in this case hill would have chosen the smaller the smoother paper because that enabled him to make these small strokes and have them and have them show the way that he wanted them to so this one but also in this case he did cover the whole paper but the paper still had to have had to be very white in other words he's relying on the brilliance of that white paper to kind of reflect through his pigments and give this the effect that he wants so what you have happening by the 1870s is many more american painters are attempting to bring watercolor practice into their orbit and they weren't sort of focused exclusively on watercolors these are oil painters who then began to see what watercolor could do for them and this was the case in the 70s and the 80s in particular and these were the most active decades of the american watercolor society when these painters had a venue to show the many works they were producing and when watercolor sales really shot up and made it worthwhile for these artists to use watercolor these tended to be somewhat smaller works in their oil paintings they tended to be somewhat more affordable so it offered them another way to promote and showcase their art many people feel that the person who did most for american watercolors was Winslow Homer and we're lucky to have an amazing cache of homers here that were bought in 1912 12 of them and that was just a year after Homer's death and it was an exhibition here in 1915 that really showcased Homer as a watercolors for the first time people knew about his watercolors he often said he would be best remembered for his watercolors and a lot of people would agree with him he started using watercolor in the early 1870s using them for the kind of plein air that is out-of-door country subject that you see here he regularly visited the farm of a friend in upstate New York and painted lots of these beautiful outdoor figure subjects what we did here was we hung a Homer from the 70s next to a Homer from the 90s so you could see just what he started to do in terms of pushing the medium beyond his initial use if you look closely at this gorgeous piece called Fresh Air it's from 1878 he's begun this picture like an oil painter would there is a very careful pencil outlined throughout the figure and he's built the figure up from dark to light using the white opacity that Rachel mentioned you start to see what he's going to do later in the looseness of the sky but everything is carefully outlined these little sheep her figure and built up from dark to light here by the 1890s he has become an incredibly liberated and inventive watercolorist where he employs washes in a completely spontaneous way understanding how they will interact with one another letting areas of blank paper remain absolutely candidly visible not trying to cover everything with a wash and using these beautiful contrasts of dark and light to show a kind of flickering natural light this was mature Homer so I don't know if you want to speak to these two or move up to the other homers whichever yeah you know I thought actually I may speak if you all want to gather a little closely around in the jungle because I there's actually a lot to look at for this one and I would encourage you to come up closely if you want as opposed as Terry was saying as opposed to this very calculated working method with fresh air here you really see how Homer has altered his composition in many stages to really come up with this watercolor he's used these kind of wet on wet washes here and he's that means when something's when he applies a watercolor he may apply another wash on top of it he may while it's still wet he may also apply a transparent watercolor layer over another after it's dried somewhat so he had to kind of carefully judge the proper wet and dry phases excuse me timing was yeah yeah very important right and he probably here has made some changes in where he had put these palm fronds here you can see he's kind of lighted up he didn't really take pains to cover up his his changes we may call the mistakes but I think he didn't see him that way he saw it as a process and so you often if you look carefully at a home where you can see all sorts of things so after he probably laid in these washes and he probably had a underdrying to lay in some of these main elements of his composition he then went in and took out things by either with a blotter he would release pigment sometimes he would use a sponge sometimes in this case he actually would take a brush and put water on top of the pigment and then pull away and that's where he's gotten these kind of they look kind of like negative images of these palm of these palm tree fronds here he's used it there he's used a little bit here he's probably done some reworking here there may have been some changes going on and there probably was a very large change here there may have been something another palm tree he started or things but he's just kind of left it the way it is here he's left where he may have had one of the trees go over this but you can still see the evidence of that and in the end he would put he kind of added these very dark very strong highlights in these palm trees these are probably the very last thing that he did I think that speaks to the whole notion of what we think is a way a watercolor is painted which is very quickly and there's no going back and the artist is only given one chance and then especially in the hands of an artist like Homer but really well before this artists were so adept at manipulating the medium that they could make changes and they would spend a lot of time on these single objects and they would return to them and make changes after the fact in separate campaigns we know that Homer did a lot of his initial watercolor work out of doors at what's called sur le motif at the spot where he found his subject but he used his studio time to go back and manipulate what he did initially and he was capable of returning to works and making significant changes well after he'd begun them what you're going to see in this photo is a picture of this image without the window mat and what you can see under with yes this is a ragboard when that this is another this just keeps the piece from directly touching the plexiglass mainly um yeah and you'll see around here that the painting is much darker and that what indicates to us immediately is that that this watercolor has faded dramatically unfortunately um it was known really since probably the late 18th century that watercolors faded um but i think people wanted to believe that they were as good as oil paintings or they were as permanent as oil paintings because they involved water and they involved paper these were all very permanent things but people chemists like field were discovering that this really wasn't true they really were susceptible to to the exposure to light um but it was a controversy that raged throughout the 19th century and finally it kind of culminated in this event when the south kensington museum in london which is now the vna museum of victorian albert was exhibiting all of britain's kind of most celebrated watercolors and they had been up for 20 or 30 years and they were considering having night hour hours and people were in some people who knew that you know or believed that watercolors were set the light so this is you know this is a horrible thing to do and so what they did was a commission to chemists russle and abney um who actually who to make a complete exhaustive study on the nature of watercolor and in 1888 they published the action of light on watercolors and they didn't indeed find that watercolors are not as permanent as oil and that um they do fade in the presence of light especially daylight especially the blue color of the spectrum especially ultraviolet light that they do fade sometimes when they're next to each other certain pigments mix to each other they do fade in the presence of oxygen they need these things and so it kind of was a new standard set for artists what's interesting is pigments come from different sources some are from mineral pigments like iron that you find the earth and um copper and mercury and other pigments are formed from plant sources like matter and indigo from the dyes they actually extract and they also each have their own very characteristic physical and chemical properties so i wanted to just show you um i want to show you a few things actually um that have to do with light exposure this is a form that we use here in the museum to help us keep track of the amount of exposure a watercolors had um it's just a way for us to balance kind of um exhibition versus preservation of course people want to see these things but if they're shown over and over they will fade and no one really will get to see them in the future so we try to balance this out and we keep very careful records of the intensity of light versus the time um that they are exposed to light and this is the meter that we use to measure intensity in foot candles and um and then of course we record the time thanks um that's a light meter um and um let's see the other thing a lot of people who wrote into our website or who left comments for example we're asking why no birch field where is your birch field well you know when we do an exhibition we have to go up to tony and rachel in the paper lab and basically ask permission to put something on view because if it's been overexposed they will say well maybe you can do four months now but then it has to be put away for five years and these are the kind of you know uh negotiations one has to do even with yourself you're thinking well one else between now and those five years might i want to use the birch field should i save it for a project that i know is upcoming and that's that's the kind of thing we need to think about yeah that's very true i just want to show you a couple samples which are really interesting actually up in the lab we had painted out some um here some strips this is a lightly painted watercolor a more heavily painted watercolor and this is an acrylic and the reason why watercolors are more susceptible to the action of light then acrylics or oil is the gum does not form a protective coating on the pigment particles the way that oil and acrylic do and so you can kind of see as it's aid this is the part that was folded in is what has been protected from light over the months that this was exposed in a window so you can see that this is a couple months i think but i don't you know not even but this is the watercolor where it's faded this is where it was protected this is a darker um a darker layer of watercolor so you don't notice the fading as much because there's more pigment there but you do see some fading and this is the acrylic and you can see where it hasn't faded at all and that's for that reason this is just another example i was telling you that some pigments fade differently than other pigments especially um organic pigments from plant materials fade quite easily and so this was a um a watercolor strips sample set that was folded up and um put in a window also exposed to light and when you undo it you can see i don't know if you can you may have to get close um it's certain pigments have faded like this one i'm going to kind of let you and this one here an exposure to light very very much so this kind of gives us an idea of how these things work um conservators have all sorts of little arts and crafts projects going all the time um should we just look at the other homer before we move to modernism and uh another thing that uh Rachel and her colleagues do fairly regularly is um treat watercolors and what we mean by that is um even though we take such good care of our works there are changes that continue to occur or there there are things that we didn't have the means of correcting at a certain point but with the growth of um treatment techniques one can undertake things that were not possible before and Rachel and Tony achieved an incredible change in this watercolor which is another this is a homer from the 1880s it's homer in all his incredible facility in the manipulation of these washes uh the way he does the rocks the very sort of abbreviated way he describes those um probably bayberry bushes uh along the shore in main where he started to live in the 1880s and uh Rachel's going to say a word about the treatment they undertook on this particular work yeah i'm going to show you i can pass around this is the upper as you're looking at the upper right corner of this image you can see it and i don't know if you can see there's little brown spots called foxing very common um to see on works of art on paper they're often can be from iron inclusions but they're often me from mold growth and these were really concentrated up here in the sky area and dotted throughout um the image um foxing is unfortunately a result of being in a climate where the relative humidity is high and it enables mold to grow they need a certain um moisture in in order to do that so in the past that this was exposed to um elevated relative humidity not here in the museum but it does leave a stain on the paper and we were able to kind of go in and locally on a on a table where it kind of pulls down a vacuum um work locally because we didn't want the water to spread as we were working and we were able to bleach out these spots and then rinse them and it has a nice effect it kind of clears it out but it also um what i wanted to mention is that before we would undertake a treatment like this we would consult the curator terry especially and say is this something do you think is worthwhile doing or you know for doing any kind of compensation but whenever we're doing something that cosmetically affects um a work of art we would certainly talk to the curator and and really try to understand more the artist intent which they can inform us on and really what's important about the piece and and how it and how it should be viewed i want to say a word about the exception table sure which i find to be a really scary thing yeah it's a table that's about you know about this big and it's got an aluminum screen on it and there's a motor that that creates a suction and pulls down and so we are able to block off small areas and get this this real pull so i'm able to put like a brush a tiny tiny brush of bleach on on this and i did in this case i did it in alcohol because i didn't want the water to really to move throughout the paper um and it will kind of it pulls down it's it's kind of it is an interesting piece of equipment and it's allowed us to work locally on things that we could never have washed or never could have treated in the past we would never have bleached this if it had an effect on the paint we would have left it that would have been a um that would have been the tradeoff in this case we knew that the bleach did not affect the pigment and so that's why we proceeded with the treatment actually and the the question is usually the one that we've bantered back and forth about is does this bother you because you know you don't really want to undertake something that might alter a work unless it's essential and the thing was that this image is so much about um abbreviation the the degree to which he didn't articulate detail that having those spots were disruptive and what he was trying to do is have these beautiful sweeps of wash that were evocative of the surface or of the sky but that hadn't been very overworked they were in fact really not his suggestion of the water this is literally two brushstrokes that he achieves the view of the water and so then for us to look at yes it did become disruptive when we started focusing on the foxing in the sky which is how we came to the decision well let's try and remove that we use a very dilute bleach um and we use a bleach that really doesn't have chlorine in it um in the past was used often and often to make papers white especially in the later part of the 19th century and artists did comment on that that their paper don't ever use a paper it looks very very white you know that you read that in manuals because they knew that bleach could harm paper in this case it's used very controlled very dilutely and after we apply the bleach we um rinse it very carefully with the proper pH water so that it should should be completely out of the paper one of the most amazing things the paper people as we call them are able to do is actually use water on a watercolor in a way that is so controlled I mean there are works that have darkened overall that they literally wash and to me the notion of washing a watercolor is just freak out time but in fact it's they're so able to control the amount of water the time the paper is saturated and again using the suction table just immediately the water is really passing through and out if I understand correctly it's not in the paper for very long right yeah you just don't you what's really great the suction table is you don't want the water to spread either and when you when water spreads in a piece of paper hasn't been washed overall you can get tight lines your own tight lines and you don't want to make your own tight lines on something that Hilmer's done um right so that's um this is kind of nature of water itself it will move discoloration that has accumulated in the paper and that's a very typical typical problem we're going to move around the corner and look at modernist watercolors this whole wall in the exhibition is devoted to actually this little area in its entirety is devoted to modernist watercolors and that is watercolors that date from the 19 teens well into the 1930s and this was a moment of great of great progress in terms of American art because many of these artists who chose watercolor as their primary medium including John Marin one of the great American modernist watercolors were able to do more adventurous and progressive things than they managed to do in their oil painting and there are many who feel that this really was the moment of America's contribution to watercolor that is in the modernist period because what these artists were doing in fact pushed the medium further than European artists were doing at the time one of the things you'll notice the most particularly in Marin but also in artists works by artists like D. there's a work by Charles DeMuth over here is that these were partial compositions they were made up of parts of forms that the artists felt were significant and that he or she then wove back into a pictorial composition that didn't always involve the entire surface and if you consider just how much of the paper remains exposed here it was not the way a 19th century artist conceived of a work where the entire picture had to be finished it had to be complete and I just realized we skipped Impressionism but we could always go back there and what happened was that with Impressionism you began to see a loosening up of application and a much more spontaneous and quick application of paint and at that point a willingness to let paper read through the composition but here it becomes really really very much of equal weight as the painted part what isn't painted has a strong compositional role as what is painted and what Marin tended to do was after isolating the kind of essential elements of a view he would add these little accent in framing lines which were for him a way of expressing the energy of a place and also completing the visual wholeness of a composition and the paper changes as well and I think that's uh I think you're gonna speak a little bit about paper here yeah right yeah um when Wattman did um develop his papers as I said he developed them in various textures for artists to use and they range from a smooth paper to a moderately textured paper to a very rough textured and you can see here that Marin is really seized kind of the use of the rough textured papers in this one and very much more so in this one you can very clearly here see the difference in the texture and as Terry was saying he used this to further his his effect of spontaneity because as he would draw the dry brush across the paper it would often kind of hit just the tops of where that rough texture we kind of call them the nubs and the valleys and that would leave kind of the valleys of the white of the paper to shine through and that that gave a very um spontaneous look to his application of um of watercolor oh I was gonna say one other thing is that um rough papers were very popular with amateur watercolors because they could be brought outside and because these were very thick papers as well when you applied water they would not cockle or buckle so artists had generally in the past had wet papers and stretched them so that when they applied watercolor they wouldn't necessarily buckle but when you had a paper this thick that was less of an issue if you want to see someone who was really giving himself completely two washes at this date it's William Zorak who was ultimately best known as a sculptor he gave up painting oil paintings in 1920 after shortly after this major trip to Yosemite but he continued to use watercolor for his sculpture as a preparatory medium doing sketches this work painted during a trip to Yosemite with his wife Marguerite shows you an artist just reveling in his ability to control colors and washes in an incredibly fluid manner and you can just sense how liquid the application is throughout this image yeah this is definitely this is an example of the pure wet on wet technique where the artist would put on a wet a wet layer of watercolor and then immediately put on another wet layer of watercolor and in the 19th century watercolors were aware finally that you didn't have to necessarily put one layer of transparent on top of another you could actually mix them while they were still wet and get a whole nother effect if you were very skilled actually that's the one such as Homer and one such as Zorak and he made very very good use of that also this paper is I just wanted if you want to kind of compare the texture of this paper to the Marin's paper you can see this is much smoother paper and this allowed Zorak to get kind of these very uniform washes unlike the more staccato washes that Marin was more sought sought after so we're going to come over here and look at the hopper and this is also a good place to tell you what these little squares mean the Brooklyn Museum was the first museum to buy a work by Edward Hopper and that was in 1923 and it was out of the first watercolor biennial that was held here not only did the museum buy amazing caches of watercolors early on like our purchase of 86 Sargent watercolors in 1909 and the homers in 1912 but beginning in 1923 the museum started to mount these annual or biannual that's every other year exhibitions of watercolors by living artists and they tended to be huge exhibitions 300 350 objects they were very spontaneously done it's harder to do exhibitions these days than it was then then people would just bring their works to the museum and they virtually went up on the wall there were no loan forms or insurance evaluations and these these exhibitions every other year ended up being an amazing venue for the museum to make its purchases and every time you see this little square indicates a watercolor that was purchased out of one of the biannual exhibitions and of course there are many more than the ones you see on view but it really was an incredibly living way for the museum to continue to build its collection the last biennial was in 1963 and we bought from them pretty consistently as i said the first hopper purchased by a museum was not this one but our other hopper which is on tour with the big hopper show it's now in washington but we decided we couldn't do an exhibition on american watercolor landscapes without hopper so we put in this work which is a more recent gift it came in in 2003 and hopper excuse me hopper was amazing for making things look easy what he tended to focus on was a brilliancy of light and the effect of light sweeping over a landscape and over the architecture in the landscape he did lots of plein air work he did many drawings preparatory to his watercolors but they still always have this wonderful kind of spontaneous effect where you feel like he was able to do it so simply and so quickly but they're very very involved in terms of his ability to work with these washes and rachel's going to say a little bit about that i mean as terry said they're they're it's not always easy to tell with a hopper how he's worked it because he's really disguised it quite well and made it look so easy i would say he's actually in this one he's applied his washes in various ways he's applied this background in a more dry manner we're just on the dry paper in parts of in other parts of the composition he's probably actually locally wet the paper so the paper swells and that way when it dries or as it's wet and you apply a wash it goes on as a more fluid layer and a more even layer so what he's done is he's worked different parts of the paper to give different effects in different areas and in addition of subtractive and that kind of the techniques and in the very end he's put on these really kind of heavy mineral pigments that he's kind of let them just kind of flood on and be there right on top to to give a little more of these dense areas so it's it's kind of it's interesting piece to take a close look at and just the fact that he's able to delineate light effects so precisely gives you a sense of his control because he's showing you where the light struck a passage of landscape or a part of a house and he doesn't air that's where the light is and that that shows a tremendous amount of control and be able to being able to separate the lights and darks through his use of washes we're just going to end in the last gallery and talk a little bit about watercolors of the depression era it was sort of interesting when we were choosing watercolors from the 30s in particular because this wasn't a time I had thought a tremendous amount about a tremendous amount before actually choosing the objects for this show I thought about oil painting a great deal in the 1930s and you sort of have a sense what 30s painting looks like in terms of this new realism much of it was work done for the WPA it tended to be sort of sober in mood and very much about the local scene throughout the country there are images of places that weren't painted until the depression era partly because of these localized government sponsored art projects but when we chose these works and put them here and started to look at them all of a sudden it became very clear what watercolor shifts had been made in this era for one thing these pictures are really dark and so the the pigment changes that you'd seen in the in oil painting the sobriety of color the the predominance of earth tones the really dramatic shift away from impressionism in particular it becomes very very much apparent here there's a sort of heaviness and a darkness in the palette there's a use of black that we simply hadn't seen since very very early that those early topographical landscapes where you have more of the the tans and the browns and the blacks and blues and all of a sudden it became very very clear how watercolor use had shifted there was still a lot of very wonderful fluid spontaneous work but the mood of it was different and it's largely dependent upon the shift in the palette you do see less impressionistic work at this point and that's completely in sync with what happened with work in oil where there was this sort of new blossoming of depression era realism art of the new deal it was usually very much about rural or urban parts of the country that before then were seldom the focus of artistic practice i think we were going to at least just point out in the sheets kind of how he has used the traditional practices of water color throughout the ages on on this even though the color palette is quite different he's really probably taken water and run it over these areas to make his highlights the texture is very apparent the white of the paper is very apparent he's probably actually just poured water on right here with a brush and to get this fiery look of his trees and it's as you can see it's kind of washed away the blue of this roof here the blue black so you know again it's really traditional way of working and altering the process with water yeah we're going to finish with a work that is the latest or just about the second to latest work in the exhibition it's from the 50s and anyone who knows the 50s will think it looks very 50s and this is a really interesting work in part because Rachel did a really lengthy treatment on this object and what you're beginning to see here is a new aesthetic and i think one influenced to some degree by new abstractions in the 1950s in the sense of an old on all over composition that was less about clearly representational landscape than it was about the process of painting itself this is called the quarry by William Thon and you can see vaguely you know these areas of veined rock and then these spindly little trees and what's really kind of interesting is that we know Thon went back to his watercolors again and again and changed them and built them up and so this ended up being one of the really more challenging treatments that Rachel undertook for this exhibition it's one that she did a blog on which is on the website as well right it was on the phone so i'm just going to turn it over to you okay yeah this is a really interesting piece this is a fairly thick piece of paper but he's added as Terry said so many layers and he's reworked it so much that you can see it has a lot of dimension it has a lot of buckling and cockling he probably started with a brush to lay in certain areas and then we think that he may have actually poured water onto the surface of this paper to kind of give these you know very feathery effects and maybe even took a brush with water and feathered edges or any edges that he saw and then he probably went in and took a sponge or a blotter and and created texture he probably did this in these areas here especially yeah definitely so he's really worked this this is the most incredible composition we really it's it's amazing to think how he even kept track of it to make it really come together as it did and the end what he did was he all he put on this india ink and also feathered that and you can kind of see a real running together here of the yellow and the black yeah and what i want to show you this is it's a beautiful effect but it did cause some problems with the stability of this of this piece you can see it especially on this bottom example it's a little it's a little more clear but what was happening and i'm going to pass it around you're welcome to take a look is this black pig this black india ink which actually had a little bit of shellac varnish in it probably became very brittle and it didn't have anything to really hold on to it because it had this big yellow layer powder a yellow layer underneath and so the black was actually lifting away and just flaking off of this painting and there's a lot of it so normally we go in with a small brush on the microscope and we add a a consolidant but you'll see you could see this on the blog as we this in this case we actually used an ultrasonic mister and we introduced a consolidant that actually has very very small particles smaller than the pigment itself and was able to kind of go into the underneath the pigment and read here the yellow and then thus read here the black sometimes we went in and and worked on the black a little bit more with a brush but anyway it was like basically yeah basically it's it's read hearing i'm sorry yeah using some type of adhesive to read here the paint layer to the paper below and that's something that we spent a lot of time on the lab doing in this case it's a photograde it's a refined gelatin you know on a very dilute in a very dilute mixture with ethanol and water no gelatin well because it's it's introduced in such a small and such a fine mist one it goes underneath and this gelatin does is very very it doesn't discolor or brown but that is a good point we would want to find the right adhesive or consolidant that one did not change the appearance of the of the image at all and something that also didn't cause it to stain or or cause more cracking or embrittlement sometimes if you put if i put something in there that was too strong it would dry and cause everything to shrink and crack and so that's what you do have to find the right balance so as we're working we often will take shots under the microscope i mean there can be when when we make our checklist of objects and we send it to conservation they review each and every object for its light exposure record and its stability and that is stability determined by a physical examination of the object so much of the change that can occur to an object is not visible to the naked eyes so they will do microscopic exams of anything that they have the least bit sense has an altered surface and so in this case they would have seen the lifting and separation under microscopy and they would also proceed with the treatment i think with a successive returns to the microscope to see what the effects of the consolidation are so this is not something that's done quickly or at a distance this is an incredibly close and painstaking process where rachel is probably working on an area what's the size of your area that you work on area by area well if i'm doing this by hand the way i did the first two times and we actually had interns to help us thank goodness um is um you know we may work on something like that for the day um but luckily we were able to use a new tool our new we have toys in the lab which was this ultrasonic mist um this is engelbrick tool from germany and we were able to do much quicker and we did it within a week you know if people have a minute we could go back and look at the hasim you want to do that okay let's do that um this is yours uh this is a work by child hasim hasim was probably the boat the the best known and most successful american impressionist painter um in terms of the amount of work he produced in terms of its real closeness to french impressionism as we know it through mone in particular and has some worked in watercolor actively throughout his career from the seventies until the time of his death which was you know 1935 hasim had a great long life and he continued to be very active and to sell well through the 1920s these are two works this one and the one over there uh that were purchased they're both from 1912 and they were purchased in 1924 a very deliberate selection on the part of the museum to buy had some watercolors in the 1920s and what you see is this is a real impressionist watercolor um hasim almost always worked out of doors by this point in time certainly by the 90s and well through his career he would do on-site watercolors and they tended to be very spontaneously done uh very much about the kind of uh broken brushwork that impressionism involved um a visual sense of process in that you can see where he brushed the watercolor uh there's nothing sort of hidden um and uh i think rachel's going to talk a little bit about pigments in this case yeah this is i think as terry was saying he worked very spontaneously and because this is a watercolor medium you can see exactly what he did um he in this case had some light highlights and used the paper again as the whites of his composition um but you can also see how we've kind of flooded the back with these washes and then these dark strokes on top probably did some subtractive techniques in here to show the the breaking of the water but what's kind of really bold about this and very impressionistic is the way he's used these mineral pigments very strongly um up here and all across the front is his last strokes and i think that's it's very interesting the way he's done that you can see he's kind of dabbed them on wet they kind of run you can see the edges of them you know he's just really done them very loosely and um quickly mineral pigments by virtue of their color or yes by virtue of their color and their nature of the way they go on this is probably um this may be an ultramarine french blue the reds the uses highlights were often vermilion they're made from the curic sulfide so they're very heavy pigments they're very different densities than the than the lakes and the and the organic pigments i guess we'll take some questions now would this be suitable for the most fragile water colors i think museum's yeah they tend to have shared standards and so these are what five to six five foot candles which is pretty low what we did in the gallery is design wise which i think worked really well is to use these dark colors as backgrounds and what happens is that the light seems to be focused more on the objects as a result and and extraneous light is absorbed so i think we did really well in terms of using a really low light level but i mean when you lend a work and this is an international standard very few museums will lend a work for exhibition over what six foot candles i mean isn't that yeah generally for something light sensitive five five yeah or something like this five yeah and we also increasingly here as well ask to know the number of hours the lights are turned on you know because some museums don't turn their lights off at night we count that as double they can't have this pictures for the same length of time if they're going to leave the lights on at night so yeah the same isn't she the same controversy going on in the late 90th century when they wanted to have night hours at the South Kensington Museum i was thinking you know some of these museums when they asked to loan a work of art they are the lights are on for 70 or 80 hours per week and we asked them to please adjust it or to cover it or that may be a factor and when the piece may go up again so we may say it can't go up for a double it has to stay off you for a double the amount of time that that we would have ordinarily recommended in this exhibition first opened at the first center in Nashville and from here in February it's going to open at the Taft in Cincinnati and so Rachel or a colleague will go to the venue or and with the light meter and you know we don't know what they do once we've left but it's all in good faith and hopefully they're not going to you know put extra spotlights on once we've left the galleries but they will literally test a light meter in front of every object in the exhibition and record and negotiate with the designers and the curators if it's too high and it sometimes is you know people complain that we don't exhibit these watercolors enough and it's it's it's a trade-off because to have them look as vibrant as they do you have to restrict their exposure and that's that's the long and short of it and that's all we can tell people but it is also why we try to do one of these big shows with some periodic regularity there ain't no going back you know and you know speaking of auction galleries auction houses and galleries you'll notice when you go in and see a Homer that's literally been bleached out you'll notice because they don't look like that they don't they don't look like that you know anyone else thanks for coming enjoy the show good