Watercolour in Britain: Travelling with Colour, Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery

The Great British Art Debate is a four-year programme that aims to provoke debate about the impact of art on the public’s perception of British identity.

This partnership between Tate Britain, Norfolk Museums & Archaeology Service (NMAS), Museums Sheffield and Tyne & Wear & Archives and Museums will lead to a series of exhibitions that will tour the various venues, changing each time to adapt to local context.

With more than £1m from the Heritage Lottery Fund and money from Renaissance, the programme presses lots of buttons in terms of good working practices: it’s a partnership between national and regional organisations; it is getting national collections out to a wider public; extra funding has been found from private sources; and the exhibitions planned have involved lots of consultation with visitors through a series of taster exhibitions held last year.

But will all this lead to an interesting series of exhibitions? On the evidence of the first show of the Great British Art Debate, which opened in January in Norwich, it will.

Norwich Castle Museum is one of 14 venues operated by NMAS. Its art department specialises in English watercolours, and its angle for this exhibition relates to how easy it is for artists to travel and work with watercolours.

The theme is used as the basis to challenge people’s perceptions of watercolours as a very traditional British artistic medium.

Watercolour in Britain: Travelling with Colour features more than 100 works and is divided into two galleries, with the first one providing a gentle introduction to the Great English Art Debate – it’s more polite chat than heated argument.

The first painting visitors see is the type that many will associate with a traditional British watercolour: Nicholas Pocock’s Dixton Church near Monmouth on the Wye, 1791.

It’s a rural scene with a boat floating on a lazy river, and the wispy smoke from the chimney of a cottage in the background. The next painting, Morston Church, 1885, by amateur painter the Rev James Bulwer, is in a similar vein.

These paintings are in the Travelling with Colour section of the exhibition, which is where the visitors see the first of two paintings in the exhibition by John Sell Cotman, the Norwich-born artist that the NMAS specialises in.

Featuring local artists is one of the ways that museums will make sure their regional identity is not forgotten in the Great British Art Debate. The exhibition at Norwich Castle Museum also has a number of works with East Anglian locations such as Norwich Market Place and Three Suffolk Towers, both by John Piper.

The first gallery continues with paintings that don’t stray too far from the traditional British watercolour. The subject is broadened out as the travelling theme takes visitors to Rome, Constantinople and other overseas locations visited by 18th- and 19th-century artists such as John Frederick Lewis and William Pars.

There are also sections devoted to watercolours by JMW Turner, who is perhaps more famous for his oil paintings, and Edward Lear, who is remembered mostly for his nonsense rhymes.

But near the start of the exhibition, an introductory area hints at the more dramatic uses of watercolour that are to come in the second gallery. These include two 20th-century works by a Chinese artist and a watercolour by an anonymous Indian artist that visitors are invited to compare with a painting by the pre-Raphaelite Dante Rossetti.

The intense colours of these watercolours prepare visitors for the second gallery, where they are immediately confronted by the works of the 20th-century English painter Edward Burra.

With titles such as Dancing Skeletons and the Miracle in the Gorbals, the bold, large-scale works by Burra are a world away from the churches, waterfalls and palaces of the first gallery. “Do theses dense, complex images mark a strange deviation from the British tradition in watercolour?” asks the graphic panel.

The rest of the second gallery treads a similar path, with more works that will make visitors reassess what they think about the nature of watercolour. There are sections devoted to English painters Graham Sutherland and John Piper.

Exploring the Medium features a range of 20th-century works by artists who have combined watercolour with other media such as pencil and crayon and even earth and PVA in the case of one of the two Anish Kapoor works on show. Exploring the Medium also has six works by Suffolk-born Maggi Hambling.

Overall, the exhibition at Norwich Castle Museum gives visitors an excellent overview of the wide range of styles and subjects used by British artists working with watercolour. The second gallery will certainly surprise a few people.

Some of the exhibition did feel like it was hastily put together. Many of the labels at the start feature information under the subheading of technique, but this gradually peters out. Also, an invitation to visitors at the end of the show to “tell us about a place in Great Britain that is special to you” manages to misspell Britain.

The text is mostly informative and well written, although unexplained art terms such as “en plein air” might baffle some.

To liven up the text, I would have preferred more quotes like the one that accompanies a work by Portsmouth-born Christopher Le Brun, who turned to watercolour later in his career: “Watercolour feels like a wonderful garden that nobody’s been in for many years and there is plenty of room in there to do things.”

The exhibition looks well supported by educational activities for children and there are a range of associated events and gallery talks. There is also a linked exhibition at the museum called Drawing Upon Cotman. which is a partnership between NMAS and MA Drawing Students from the Norwich University College of the Arts.

It will be interesting to see how the theme of watercolours is interpreted at the three other venues in the partnership. Tate Britain will only be using four of the watercolours from Norwich in its show next year and will have a very different set of topics.

The other exhibition strands for the Great British Art Debate are Relative Values; Restless Times; and a monographic show of the work of the 19th-century artist, John Martin. The Norwich exhibition is a good start, but hopefully the debate will crank up a few notches in the shows that are to come.

Cost (for whole programme) £1.146m from Heritage Lottery Fund, plus other support
Main funders HLF, Renaissance £24,747 via NMAS, East Anglia Art Fund, Archant Norfolk, County & Eastern, NMAS
Curator Andrew Moore
Exhibition ends 18 April