Watercolor Sails Sailing
How noted watercolor artists paint sailboats.
All of these watercolor artists approach their paintings differently from my watercolor.
Can you spot what's different? (Answer below)
1
Three Scudding Sailboats
Charles Sydney Hopkinson (1869-1962), American
Watercolor on paper, circa 1935-1940
Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, MA
Charles Sydney Hopkinson (1869-1962) was an American portrait painter and landscape watercolorist. He maintained a studio in the Fenway Studios building in Boston from 1906 to 1962. He was one of the most successful and sought after portrait painters in America during the first half of the 20th century. He was the house portraitist at Harvard University. Among his sitters were Oliver Wendell Holmes, Calvin Coolidge, Lewis Perry and John Masefield. In the course of his 60 year career he created more than 700 portraits including two of United States presidents, four of Supreme Court Justices and 65 of university presidents, deans and professors. He was also part of the team of artists selected by the National Art Committee in 1919 to paint portraits of the delegates to the Versailles Peace Conference.
Watercolor was a medium that Hopkinson experimented with and enjoyed throughout his career. Working outdoors with rapid, broken brushstrokes, Hopkinson's watercolors are direct and spontaneous, fresh reactions to the scene around him. While his compositions can seem deceptively simple, each was thoughtfully conceived and painted with careful attention to depth and perspective.
Southend - The Pleasure Yacht
James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), American
Watercolor on paper, 14" x 17" (w x h), circa 1882-1884
Smithsonian national Museum of Asian Art, Washington, D.C.
Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, Whistler studied in Paris and eventually moved to London. He learned watercolor technique as a boy and occasionally used it for preparatory studies early in his career, says Lee Glazer, director of the Lunder Institute for American Art at Colby College. "But despite the tremendous popularity of watercolor in the British art world, and Whistler's ultimate desire for success within that art world, he never seriously embraced watercolor until the 1880s."
That's when he painted this and others in the Southend of London, historically a rural village at the south of the parish of Lewisham, Kent. During the time Whistler painted his 1880s watercolors it remained undeveloped until after the First World War. It's now a residential suburb, with some large retail stores, within the built-up area of London.
Two Sailboats
Winslow Homer (1836–1910)
Watercolor, gouache and graphite on paper, 17" x 8" (w x h), 1880
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA
Homer's skill as a watercolor painter grew during his second long sojourn in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1880, when his work became breathtakingly fluid and impressionistic. Exploiting the texture of the paper and the range of transparency in his pigments, Homer used techniques like scraping to add highlights to his boldly simplified compositions.
Racing Sails
Milton Avery (1885-1965), American
Watercolor, transparent and opaque, and graphite paper,
35" x 23" (w x h), 1960
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
"He was, without question, our greatest colorist. ... Among his European contemporaries, only Matisse—to whose art he owed much, of course—produced a greater achievement in this respect." - Art critic Hilton Kramer
A Boat near Santa Marta, Venice
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), British
Watercolor on paper, 13" x 9" (w x h), 1840
Tate Museum, London, England
In August 1840 Turner crossed the Channel to Rotterdam, and travelled up the Rhine on what was to be his last journey to Italy, the country that had inspired so much of his work. His destination was Venice, where he arrived on August 20th. Venice was then a city of crumbling palaces, fitting Turner's typically Romantic fascination with the decline of once great civilizations. He spent two weeks in the city, staying at the Hotel Europa. He made an extensive series of richly colored watercolors of every part of this serene city. They show Venice under a variety of atmospheric conditions, from the haziness of dawn to the crisp sunlight of midday, and finally the coloring of twilight and the setting sun.
Editor and critic Charles Lewis Hind wrote that it showed "the way [Turner] worked, when painting for his own pleasure, not for exhibition – green water, violet hills, rosy buildings held together by the strength of that tawny sail – lovely."
Venice
George Elbert Burr (1859-1939) American
Watercolor and pencil on paper, 9" x 6" (w x h), 1900
Smithsonian American Art Museum
George Elbert Burr is considered one of the finest of the early 20th-century American etchers. His prints are in a number of prominent collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the British Museum, the French National Print Collection, Luxembourg Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, the New York Public Library, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Northern Arizona. and the Congressional Library in Washington, D.C.
Sailboat
Edward Hopper (1882-1967), American
Watercolor and graphite on paper,
4" x 5" (w x h), circa 1900
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
Edward Hopper graduated from Nyack High School in 1899. The next year he painted this sailboat. In school he'd dreamed of being a naval architect, but after graduation he declared his intention to follow an art career. Hopper's parents insisted that he study commercial art to have a reliable means of income. In developing his self-image and individualistic philosophy of life, Hopper was influenced by the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He later said, "I admire him greatly...I read him over and over again."
Hopper began art studies with a correspondence course in 1899. Soon he transferred to the New York School of Art and Design, the forerunner of Parsons School of Design. There he studied for six years.
Idle Sails
John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), American
Watercolor and graphite on paper, 21" x 14" (w x h), 1913
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Sargent painted more than 2,000 watercolors, from the English countryside to Venice to the Tyrol, Corfu, the Middle East, Montana, Maine, and Florida. Each destination offered pictorial stimulation and treasure. Even at his leisure, in escaping the pressures of the portrait studio, he painted with restless intensity, often painting from morning until night. In the last decade of his life (1915-1925), he produced many watercolors in Maine, Florida, and in the American West, of fauna, flora, and native peoples.
His late works suggest Sargent painting purely for himself. His watercolors were executed with a joyful fluidness. He also painted extensively family, friends, gardens, and fountains. This watercolor, Idle Sails, was inherited by his sisters, Mrs. Francis Ormond (Violet Sargent) donating it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art upon in 1950.
Sargent's first major solo exhibit of watercolor works was in 1905 in London. In 1909, he exhibited eighty-six watercolors in New York City, eighty-three of which were bought by the Brooklyn Museum.
In 1927 Evan Charteris wrote: "To live with Sargent's watercolors is to live with sunshine captured and held, with the luster of a bright and legible world, the refluent shade and the ambient ardors of the noon."
Answer:
All of these watercolor artists painted their sailboats from afar. They painted as observers and not participants of sailing. None of them painted their watercolors from the perspective of being aboard a sailboat, as I did. Surprisingly, few artists choose the sailing perspective from aboard a sailboat.
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