Watery depths

I learnt to splash about in watercolour at my grandmother’s knee. Or rather, sitting beside her crouched over a pad of thickly ‘toothed’ paper and a Winsor & Newton paintbox on a wind-swept East Anglian seashore. Now, looking back, I see that what she was doing belonged to a tradition. Her predecessors, idols and reference points are to be seen in an admirable small exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Watercolour — Elements of nature.

This consists of works from the museum’s collection, but is much more full of delightful surprises — even for those who know the Fitzwilliam well — than that description suggests. The reason is that, while most British galleries own plenty of watercolours, you don’t often see them because they are fragile. Exposed to light, the paper turns yellow and the colours fade.

This is presumably why, although Samuel Palmer’s ‘The Magic Apple Tree’, c. 1830, is one of the Fitzwilliam’s most compelling possessions — a masterpiece of visionary rustic romanticism — it is not always to be seen on display.