Drawing Attention
6 May 2021
How the market for watercolours and drawings has changed over the last few decades, and into the pandemic.
Huon Mallalieu
Huon Mallalieu is an historian who writes on art, antiques and collecting for The Times, Country Life and The Oldie. He is the author or editor of many books, including The Dictionary of British Watercolour Artists and 1066 and Rather More, a Walk through History. He is FSA and Hon RWS.
Friedrich Johann Justin Bertuch, "Insecten ...", Germany, 1790-1830. In the National Museum in Krakow.
Public domain, courtesy of The National Museum in Krakow, via The Watercolour World.
In 2019 an extraordinarily ambitious online project was launched to document watercolours in public and private collections worldwide dating from before about 1900 when photography became a reliable medium of record. The Watercolour World aims to create a world-wide, geographically-indexed online archive of documentary watercolours up to 1900, including topographical, anthropological and botanical images covering observed events, people, places, landscapes and seascapes. This important resource had been largely ignored until then, and it has already proved as invaluable to ecologists mapping coastal erosion, melting ice, deforestation and the loss of fauna and flora, as to architectural, local and social historians.
From the 17th century onwards travellers produced an immense amount of material, since they needed to record what they saw, and watercolour proved the most efficient medium to do so. This was one of the reasons why watercolour painting flourished so strongly in Britain, and why drawings became so popular with British collectors. The Watercolour World makes it much easier for collectors and curators to identify subjects and artists, and sometimes to establish provenance for paintings and objects shown in interiors. Also, since it treats them as documents rather than aesthetic works, amateur and minor drawings are as important to it as great art. Over 130,000 watercolours have been uploaded, and there have been 2 million website views. The digitalisation service is free to participating collectors.
This is also a boost for a market that many had thought moribund. Traditionally collectors of drawings were clubbable. They enjoyed showing purchases and sharing the results of their research. During the second half of the 20th century demand for English watercolours, which had been a quiet corner of the hardly less somnolent market in Old Master and Continental drawings, caught fire, burned bright and then died down. The reasons for the rise and comparative decline are evident: in the early years there was an abundant supply of very reasonably priced material, but prices were driven up by the activities of major collectors, most notably Paul Mellon, who secured anything really good. With the best no longer available, it became less profitable for large galleries such as Agnew and Spink to maintain specialist departments and more difficult for smaller dealers to match profits to rising gallery costs. There were also fewer scholar-collectors interested in discovering attractive but minor works.
Edward Lear (1812-1888), Mount of Olives, Jerusalem. Inscribed lower left: Mount of Olives/4.20 PM 10 April 1867. and numbered 31 lower right. Pen and brown ink and watercolour over traces of pencil. 24 x 50.1 cm.
John Bingley Garland (1791-1875), One of the Blood Collages, Collage of engravings and gold paper with gouache and gold paint with extensive inscriptions in pen and ink on buff backing paper, 52 x 39 cm, executed circa 1850-60.
Credit: Minneapolis Institute of Art, USA, c/o Lowell Libson & Jonny Yarker Ltd.
Given its reliance on personal viewing, at fairs as well as in galleries, this market might have been expected to suffer particularly during the pandemic, but, in fact, many remaining dealers have adapted well to online trading. Lisbon & Yarker of Clifford St, W1, specialists in British paintings and drawings, have taken the opportunity of moving the gallery across the street to offer five online shows since last April. Jonny Yarker tells me that: “we have made new clients and sold to people who have been on our mailing lists, but haven’t been active with us for some years. Last May we mounted an exhibition of ten drawings by Turner, all of which found new homes very rapidly”. Beyond that they have made “really substantial sales” to private and institutional clients. Three major US museums bought from a group of extraordinary 19th century collages of prints, poetry and drops of red ink “blood” by John Bingley Garland, a Canadian merchant and politician.
Guy Peppiatt, a specialist with a gallery in Mason’s Yard, SW1, has also done well on-line and on wall, most recently with a show of more than 30 watercolours and drawings by Edward Lear, the majority of which sold quickly. Surprisingly it was the first selling show for Lear for about 30 years.
Home-based dealer Karen Taylor has had to rely on the internet more than most, and overcoming initial reluctance to buy without viewing, she has done well with both international and British collectors and institutions. “High resolution images”, she says, “have been very useful to help potential buyers judge condition - but it is hard to get the colour right”. She notes that collectors are more focussed nowadays, and laments “Gone are the sales of huge collections in solander boxes”. In fact, just such a nostalgic auction will shortly be announced - watch this space!
Abbott & Holder of Museum St, WC1, traditionally a pile ’em high business, has had to refine its operation in recent years, but it is still the place for traditional collectors to find reasonably priced and interesting things. Philip Athill, who had been with the firm since 1979 and took over from John Abbott in 2001, has just retired, passing it on to Tom Edwards. Stock books show that over 120,000 pieces of paper and canvas - mostly the former - have been through Philip’s hands in that time.
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