A feast of visual delight

There are just 26 drawings and watercolours in the magnificent exhibition at Lowell Libson, but they are all of such quality and interest that the show is a feast of connoisseurship and visual delight. Selected by Libson and Christopher Baker from the National Gallery of Scotland, the range of work gives a distinct flavour of the museum’s holdings, from major watercolours made for exhibition to more informal studies. Here are the big names (Turner, Constable, Blake) and the lesser-known (William Callow, John Webber). Most deal with travel or landscape, but there are figure studies and visions, too. The variety within such a small compass is impressive. For pure pleasure, this show is hard to beat.

In the first viewing room is a large and airy landscape by William Turner of Oxford, depicting Halnaker Windmill, near Chichester. This substantial work, with its poignant use of distant blue and its mastery of space, made me want to look more at a painter I had rather discounted; meanwhile the words of Belloc’s famous poem in Ivor Gurney’s setting echoed through my mind. Next to it hangs Girtin’s ‘Stepping Stones on the Wharfe, Yorkshire’, composed of seemingly prim olive greens and dun browns, but as if illuminated from within. In the centre of the adjacent wall hangs a marvellous, almost monochrome watercolour, in limpid blue-greys and yellow-greys. This is ‘The Colosseum from the north’ by John Robert Cozens, like a vision or a pale silhouette, shimmering on the point of dissolving back into light like a mirage. A mountain scene by Cozens is next and then an evocative pencil drawing by Constable of boats overhung with trees and drawn up on the bank of the River Severn at Worcester.

A typically salacious Rowlandson, inscribed ‘Caricature of Dr Johnson’, depicts a gentleman (surely not Dictionary Johnson?) making a grab at a cross-looking but comely chambermaid.