A Salute to Watercolour by Max Angus (SIGNED) Hardcovber

Published 1996 - Hardcover

ute to Watercolour, written in praise of the medium itself, traces watercolour from its origins in Europe, through its flowering in England during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and moves on to evaluate the medium's role in the topographical recording of the colonies of Van Diemen's Land and New South Wales.

The work of key artists in the northern hemi- sphere development (Albrecht Dürer, Claude Lorrain, JMW Tumer, John Constable, Anthony Van Dyck, John Sell Cotman, Philip Wilson Steer and John Marin) is assessed. Two English artists who were amongst those who introduced watercolour into the Australian colonies (John Skinner Prout and Francis Simpkinson) are discussed.

The text then becomes, in part, autobiographical with Max Angus introducing prominent figures in the history of Australian art and art administration whom he has admired or known during the past sixty years. The artists discussed, all prominent in New South Wales and Tasmania, are Julian Ashton, Lucien Dechaineux, John Eldershaw, Jack Carington Smith and Robert Campbell.

The fifty-one colour plates which illustrate this book include an example of the work of all the artists mentioned, with the historical plates being supplemented by examples of Max Angus's own paintings, in part retrospective, included to illuminate the observations in the text. There is an exposition of the author's practice in the medium, and notes on his Lake Pedder and the 1967 bushfire series. The author's arguments, backed by the powerful images which illustrate this book, strongly support his thesis that watercolour in no sense occupies a subsidiary position in relation to other art mediums.

A bibliography and index complete the text.