The invention in 1900 by Eastman Kodak of the Brownie camera, selling for the equivalent in today’s money of £28, brought the watercolour age to an end. This too had begun, in the mid-18th century, with technical innovations, such as the development of the cotton-rich Whatman paper favoured by artists and of ready-made watercolour paints, sold in the pocket-sized black tin paintboxes with which we remain familiar today.
In the pre-camera age, watercolour was the medium that amateurs and professional artists alike used to create a visual record of the world they encountered. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were typical of the leisured classes in being at once keen practitioners of the art and collectors of paintings that they kept as visual records of their travels.
Huge numbers of watercolours have survived, many of them in private collections, tucked away in folios, boxes, scrapbooks, and albums. They constitute such a comprehensive visual record of the world prior to 1900 that the charity called The Watercolour World is collecting them and making them available in a database anyone can access.
Q&A with site supervisor Jacqui Wood