Cover Story: Looking and Dreaming

As serendipitous an exhibition as one could imagine marks the re-opening of the Taft Museum of Art and inaugurates its new Fifth Third Bank Special Exhibitions Gallery. To Observe and Imagine: British Drawings and Watercolors, 1600-1900 comes from the Morgan Library in New York City, an institution that’s as much a celebration of the joy of the private collector as the Taft itself. The Library’s collection of works on paper is one of the finest in the country, an outgrowth of Pierpont Morgan’s own collecting habits.

Drawings and watercolors have a personal feel — it’s easy to imagine them being held in the hand, to hear the collector saying “Just take a look at this!” Temporary walls neatly partition the Taft’s new gallery into room-like sections that allow these relatively small works to be seen to best advantage. The use of excess space in the entry hall expands the walls for this show, suggesting that the gallery will prove to be a flexible instrument.

Charles and Anna Taft only occasionally showed interest in drawings or watercolors, but when they did so they tended to buy Turners. The 10 Turner watercolors within the Taft’s collection are a rich anomaly, playing off the superb Turner oil, “Europa and the Bull,” and providing a living link to watercolors by Turner in the current exhibition from the Morgan. All 10 of the Taft’s Turner watercolors are on view through July 4 in the Keystone Gallery in the main house, breaking with the museum’s long established custom of showing only two of them at any one time.

Because works on paper can’t be exposed to light for long periods, a new rotation is being established to exhibit all the Turner watercolors together for a few weeks each year.

They look quite wonderful in the newly painted Keystone Gallery, its walls a pale ecru that sets them off perfectly. Mostly European landscapes or seascapes, these works are clear evidence of Turner’s surpassing skill in the medium.

To Observe and Imagine, as it happens, shows where Turner was coming from and what happened thereafter. The Brits are seldom first off the mark in the visual arts and in the 17th century, where this exhibition begins, they were looking to visiting foreign artists.

Hogarth came elbowing in, however, and a true English voice was heard. His red chalk preliminary drawings for four famous prints are among the first things to meet your eye when you enter the exhibition. Penciled notations and additions give them the wonderful intimacy drawings can convey.

Landscape, often lurking about in British art even when the subject is ostensibly something else, is well represented here. These works sometimes show how much can be conveyed by a few evocative lines, as in John Linnell’s “View of Amwell Hill.”

During the 18th century, Italian landscape had English artists in thrall. One of them, John Robert Cozens, was a particular influence on Turner and a younger crowd. Cozens’ work along with that of his father, Alexander, and others of the Italy-smitten school is an engaging element of the exhibition.

Intimacy, as noted, is no small part of the charm of watercolors and drawings, perhaps nowhere more so in this exhibition than in the juxtaposition of Turner’s “The Pass at Faido,” which once belonged to his most vocal admirer, the critic John Ruskin, with a little painting in which Ruskin essays a copy of the lower left corner of Turner’s work. In the last section of the show is a self-portrait of Ruskin, brooding — he was always a brooder — and wearing a blue neck cloth.

The presence of works by Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds, the great 18th-century English portraitists, provides another direct line to the Taft’s permanent collection where Gainsborough’s “Edward and William Tomkinson” never fails to please, and Reynolds’ two portraits of mothers with young sons relate interestingly to the Morgan’s “fancy picture” by Reynolds of “The Infant Hannibal.” Also not to be missed are sketchbooks displayed in glass cases, which include Reynolds’ Roman sketchbook, compiled in 1750.

Among the portraits is one that can’t be topped for throwaway elegance: Richard Cosway’s little full-length study of 13-year-old Horace Beckford, the face and right hand detailed in watercolor and the rest of the figure delicately delineated in graphite. Beckford would grow up to change his name, become a baron and accidentally drown in the Serpentine in London’s Kensington Park, but at 13 he was all grace and style.

The exhibition closes with a gathering of Pre-Raphaelite works, set off to themselves as their progenitors would no doubt prefer. Several of these artists were active illustrators of books, adding to their interest for the Morgan Library collection.

The “observers” of this exhibition reproduced buildings or landscapes or people as faithfully as possible; the “imaginers” made a further leap. William Blake, one of the most gifted imaginers of history, is given a wall to himself for two illustrations for the Book of Job and two for Milton’s poems. The Swiss artist Henri Fuseli treats forces of evil in a manner that might have influenced super-hero comic artists of today, whether they know it or not.

The very best artists meld observance and imagination, and what this exhibition shows us is that Turner — cantankerous, reclusive and sometimes rude — pulls that off as well as anybody. The exhibition complements and supplements the collection that lives in the Taft Museum.

This article appears in May 19-25, 2004.