The watercolor painting is the oldest of painting technique known by the man. It has been used from prehistoric times and all over the world.
Watercolor requires a high technical skill in its execution by limiting to the maximum the corrections and amendments; because this it is the scarce number of artists dedicated exclusively to this type of painting in where it is imposed the transparency and the white color is omitted. The watercolor is composed of a pigments soluble in water and gum arabic. These pigments can be transparent or opaque
The history of the watercolor is narrowly connected with the history of the paper, invented by the Chinese, shortly after the year 100 a. C. The production of the paper was introduced in Spain by the moorish conquerors in the middle of the XII century and it reaches Italy 25 years later. The technique that precedes the watercolor was called "painting buon fresh" that it is watercolor applied to a wall covered with humid gypsum. So, the "fresh" painting, one of the most known forms of art, is watercolor. The majority of the people that admire the impressive work of Miguel Angel, in the Sistine Chapel, probably they ignore that they are contemplating the most magnificent of the paintings carried out in watercolor, ( begun in 1508 and finished in 1514).
The invention of the oil painting by the Dutch Master Painters,made decline a little the interest for the fresh painting and the watercolor was relegated to be used as the vehicle to draw preliminary sketchs or like a tool for studies.
In Germany, Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) painted in watercolor and his influence is partly responsible for the existence of the first school of watercolor in Europe.
The technological advance in manufacturing paints and paper that took place in England in the last decades of the 18th century permitted and encouraged the British artists to develop the technique of painting with transparent colors on especially elaborated white paper.
During the same century, some French, among them Jean Honor Fragonard (1732-1806), they dedicated an important number of their works to the watercolor. But the improvement and the progresses that this thousand-year-old technique has done, it comes from England, where the artists already had carried the watercolor painting to a category as high as the oil painting. By that time, the watercolor was utilized to do drawings of architectural perspectives. The artists took this theme and they developed it, by adding personages and animals to their compositions. William Turner was one of this first artist. It was then that this technique was important again and it becames the favorite one for many artists, not only in England but in the remainder of European countries and in the United States.
The inherent brightness in the watercolor painting, combined with the capacity
of its fast execution gave the landscape painters the ideal tool to register the effects of movement, shadows and ligts, transparency and the delicacy of the nature.
But it was the genius of the American artists such as
Winslow Homer, James A. McNeill, Whistler, John LaFarge, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam and Maurice Prendergast, among others,
the ones that revealed the potentiality
of the watercolor as a serious and beautiful way of artistic expression.
The "British Society of Painters in Watercolours", founded in 1804, was the first association created to group the watercolorists painters and to provide them a permanent source of support. This English initiative was followed without delay in the remainder of European countries. Similar institutions have been created in the more important cities of America.
The "American Society of Painters in Watercolours" was founded in the United States in 1866 and for the first time the art galleries exhibited works in watercolor next to oil paintings.
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