Watercolour, Tate Britain

Does watercolour painting suffer from an image problem? Do you think of the wild, vaporous seascapes of Turner, or Victorian ladies at their sketchbooks dabbing daintily at wishy-washy flower paintings? Do you associate the medium with radical innovation or with staid tradition? And would Jackson Pollock have appeared quite so heroic flinging thin washes of watercolour around instead of viscous oils?

The curators at Tate Britain certainly think there’s a problem with perception, so they want us to lay down whatever preconceptions we might have of watercolour simply being the medium of choice for the happy amateur and to explore its unique and malleable properties. After all, great artists down the centuries have produced works comparable in power – arguably – to their work in oils. Turner harnessed its luminous qualities in paintings such as The Blue Rigi, Sunrise, 1842 (pictured below right), a magnificent meditation on varying light and colour effects. And what’s more, it’s the artists of this country who are widely acknowledged as watercolour’s greatest exponents.

Why should that be? This exhibition, which features over 200 works, sets out  to explore this question and begins with the medieval illuminated manuscript. The jewel-bright opaque colours in these early illustrations show little of how the medium will come to be used as a way of conveying spontaneity. For that it will have to wait a few centuries. Compare, for instance, a landscape painted by the Antwerp-born Van Dyck in 1635-41 (A Coastal Landscape with Trees and Ships) with that painted by the English artist John Dunstall, A Pollard Oak near Hampnett Place, Chichester (main picture), some two decades later. The earlier painting is beautifully fluid and free, and though Dunstall’s picture is rather beautiful in its own way it does look incredibly naïve and antiquated by comparison.

Dunstall was still using the techniques mastered by medieval manuscript illuminators and it wasn’t until the very late 18th century and the early years of the 19th century that we see watercolourists begin to enjoy its unique qualities. Difficult to master, yet easier to use than oils, not least because water-based paint dries quickly and is easily portable (with only an additional sketchbook needed), it became the medium of choice for artists painting rapidly in the rugged outdoors. The golden age of artists such as Thomas Girton and Francis Towne had arrived.

Taking a thematic rather than a strictly chronological approach, we pass from sections entitled "Travel and Typography" to "Inner Vision" and "Abstraction and Improvisation". The exhibition takes in a range of techniques, from loose and shimmering washes of translucent colour to precise draughtsmanship. There’s a great section on artists and war, which includes Wire, 1918-19 (pictured left), a dark and powerfully haunting painting of a desolate, scarred landscape by Paul Nash, an official war artist on the Western Front during World War One, as well as surgical portraits of facially disfigured soldiers, painted as medical documents rather than works of art.

These hold their own fascination, but the exhibition is so eager to get away from any association of tweeness that it often forgets some of the greatest exponents of watercolour painting during this period. I would have loved to have seen Gwen John’s exquisite miniatures of her beloved cats, for instance, because they too possess a singularity of vision as rich and as deep as anything we encounter in this exhibition. And yet she is overlooked for works by lesser and often little-known artists. Furthermore, the exhibition ends rather bizarrely, not with a painting but with a ragged installation of roughly daubed cellophane which hangs like a flimsy, crinkled hammock between two walls – or, rather aptly, like a great, deflated balloon. At the very least I would have said that the use of watercolour in Karla Black’s Opportunity for Girls, 2006 (pictured above right), is incidental rather than integral to the work. In any case, it’s a sorry way to end an exhibition that begins with such promise.

• Watercolour at Tate Britain from 16 February to 21 August
• Find Watercolour exhibition catalogue on Amazon