A time for living dangerously

Why watercolours deserve their revival in popularity

When the National Gallery ran its eye-tracking experiment last year into how we look at pictures, the works selected for the test were all oil paintings. Had they been watercolours, the results might have been quite different. Going round the Girtin show at Tate Britain recently, I noticed that people look at watercolours differently. Without the National Gallery’s sophisticated surveillance equipment, I’m not in a position to comment on their eye movements, but I can report that they look harder and closer, as if their interest is not just in a picture’s subject, but in how it’s made.

This may be partly because, on a mid-week afternoon in August, the gallery was packed with eager dabblers on the lookout for top watercolour tips. But they can’t all have been Sunday painters, and they all peered. The size of the pictures doesn’t explain it, as most are quite large. The only explanation I can think of is that watercolour encourages this sort of intimacy by wearing its art transparently on its sleeve. As a painting medium, it is open and democratic: you don’t have to remove its veils of pigment to arrive at the secret of its creation, nor do you need a training in picture conservation to see exactly how much or how little work went into it. ‘A lot of work’, observed one lady visitor of one picture, and of another: ‘There’s hardly anything there!’ (The first was by Edward Dayes, the second by Turner; watercolour also has a subversive habit of turning the Protestant work ethic on its head.)