Georgia Museum of Art | Collections

WEST FOUNDATION COLLECTION

The British watercolors in the West Foundation Collection span more than 100 years of 18th- and 19th-century image making by renowned artists, including Samuel Owen (1768-1857), Samuel Prout (1783-1852), Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827), and Arthur Fitzwilliam Tate (1819-1905). In the West Foundation Collection, viewers glimpse nature in various aspects, urban landscapes, and genre scenes. The more than 50 watercolors include paintings of the old quarters, streets, hillsides, and people of rural and urban Britain. The harbors and shores of England provided subject matter for many of the artists in the collection: Nicholas Pocock (1740-1821) painted the seacoast at Bristol, while Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding (1787-1855) captured the tides at Sussex. Other British artists created images from their Grand Tours of the continent, especially scenes of Italy: James Baker Pyne (1800-1870) at Lago Maggiore; John O'Conner (1830-1889) at Verona; and Myles Birket Foster (1825-1899) at Pisa. A female exhibitor at the Royal Academy, Louise J. Rayner (1832-1924) painted Bridge Street, Chester, from the end of the 19th century, featuring the typical realism of Victorian watercolor in its interest in architectural detail. Dominated by Victorian-era images, over half of the collection is devoted to the more highly finished "exhibition" watercolor, prized not as a sketch but as a complete product.