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In watercolor, the burgeoning nature worship of English romanticism found its medium. "If wood, water, groves, valleys, glades, can inspire poet or painter, this is the country, or this is the age to produce them," wrote Horace Walpole. But if it suited the outward urge, it was also the supreme vehicle for the inward eye. The visionary side of English art was expressed through it, most famously by William Blake and Samuel Palmer. Palmer's belief that he inhabited, in England, a paradisiacal "valley of vision" imbued even the humblest of his studies, like A Cow Lodge with a Mossy Roof, with a sublime imaginative pressure. Every fleck on that encrusted roof, every touch of light and shadow on the tawny, mottled foliage behind, is painted with an obsessed and grateful reverence.
Palmer had learned a basic fact about the medium: that it is a stain, a blot. Make a mark and let the image develop out of that. He declared himself to be "by nature a lover of smudginess," and inquired: "May not half the Art be learned from the gradations in coffee grounds?" It could, and the proof was given by J.M.W. Turner, whose life's work can be seen—under one aspect—as a prolonged and magnificently worked-out dialogue between observation and indeterminacy. That Turner, who died in 1851, was a far more "modern" artist than any of the French Impressionists, is hardly a matter of dispute. (The only French landscape artist of the late 19th century who can survive any comparison with him is Monet.) Turner's Vesuvius in Eruption, 1817—"a reddened, yellowed and delicious horror," one of his contemporaries called it—is extravagantly spontaneous, the washes cut and scratched back to white with a knife or a brush handle, but it sums up the strange modernity of his techniques.
Nobody else exploited the transparency of watercolor as thoroughly as Turner. He reversed the traditional method of painting on a dark ground and working up to the high tones. The basic ground of Turner's watercolors is white, reflected light. In watercolors like Vesuvius, and more so in his opalescent canalscapes of Venice, Turner stated the identity of light and color as no previous artist had done. "They are pictures of the elements," wrote William Hazlitt in 1816. "The artist delights to go back to the first chaos of the world." From that chaos, a great deal of what we now call modernism was due to be born. · Robert Hughes