watercolour

The English word 'watercolor' (or 'watercolour' in British spelling) is a straightforward compound: water + color. It appeared in the late 1500s to describe pigments suspended in a water-soluble binder, typically gum arabic. What makes the word unusual is its naming logic. Oil paint is named for its binder (oil). Tempera is named for its binder (egg tempera, from Latin temperāre, to mix). Acrylic is named for its binder (acrylic polymer). Watercolor alone is named for the thing you add to thin it.

Watercolor painting existed long before the English word. Ancient Egyptian scribes painted with water-soluble pigments on papyrus. Chinese and Japanese ink wash painting — using water and carbon ink — dates back over two thousand years. But the Western watercolor tradition as a distinct art form crystallized in eighteenth-century England. Paul Sandby, often called the father of English watercolor, and later J.M.W. Turner transformed what had been a sketching and illustration medium into something that rivaled oil painting in ambition.

Turner's watercolors changed what the medium could do. His late works — storms, sunsets, waves dissolving into light — pushed watercolor into abstraction decades before oil painters followed. The Venice watercolors of the 1840s are barely representational: washes of gold and blue with just enough line to suggest a gondola or a campanile. Turner understood that watercolor's weakness — its transparency, its refusal to cover mistakes — was its strength.

Watercolor carries a reputation for being a lesser medium. Art schools often teach it as a precursor to 'real' painting in oils. Auction prices for watercolors trail oil paintings by significant margins. This hierarchy is cultural, not technical. A Turner watercolor sells for millions. A bad oil painting sells for nothing. The medium is not the problem. The name, with its plainness, may contribute to the perception. Water and color. Nothing impressive-sounding about that.