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In Paleolithic Europe, it was surmised that man mixed pigments with water to create paint, leading to the first cave paintings: the earliest records of history and art. Since then, watercolour painting, either as an art form or an instrument of history, has been largely favoured by many artists. Ancient Egyptians used water-based paints to decorate temples and tombs, and for some of the first works on paper. During the Middle Ages in Europe, monasteries were commissioned to create engrossed or illustrated manuscripts for posterity. The artists, often monks, used tempera to painstakingly copy scriptures on parchment made from sheepskin or calfskin, with entire pages full of elaborate scrollwork and symbolic images at times..
Most famous, however, were the fresco paintings of the Renaissance era. This method was derived from mixing pigments in water and applying those to wet plaster, thus creating large wall paintings and murals. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco (1512) in the Vatican, which took four years to complete, is a great example of this. In Asia, water-soluble pigments were a common medium in Indian, Persian and Chinese art forms..
Yet, watercolour painting as art, the way we know it now, didn’t truly emerge until the late 15th century in Germany. Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer, who created botanical, wildlife and landscape paintings, was an early exponent of watercolour paintings. Besides paper, woodblock illustrations in books or broadsheets were also popular..
Watercolour painting spread to England in the 18th century. Among the greats were Romantic painters Paul Sandby, Thomas Girtin, J.M.W. Turner. Turner was particularly famous for his aggrandised British landscapes, often imaginatively using shipwrecks, fires, natural catastrophes and elements like sunlight, storm and fog as subjects. He brought a light, ethereal quality to his paintings, and was even considered the preface to Impressionism..
In India, South Indian Mysore paintings, dating its origins to Ajanta times between 2nd century B.C. and 7th century A.D., contained elements of water-based pigments and depicted Hindu gods and goddesses. It was during the British Raj that watercolour paintings began selling commercially. In lieu of the camera which didn’t arrive until the early 19th century, European patrons of the East India Company would commission Indian artists to create souvenir style of paintings depicting the Indian life and landscape. This “Company Style” (“Kampani Kalam” in Hindi) was a hybrid blend of Mughal and Rajput elements with the Western techniques for imitating soft tones, ranging from miniatures to life-size paintings. This trend didn’t last long after photographs began replacing it..
In the next century or so, Indian artists worked almost exclusively with oils and imitated the Western style of painting. With the growing swadeshi movement for independence, the art sphere followed suit. The Bengal School of Art, spearheaded by Abanindranath Tagore, reacted against the British schools of academic art and began emphasizing on techniques resonating with an Oriental style of art. Abanindranath’s Bharat Mata, a watercolour depicting a young woman stylised as a spiritual goddess, has nationalist elements in tandem with the mood of the hour. His protégé, Nandalal Bose, also espoused his ideology and strove to create an Indian style of naturalism distinct from Western influences, and preferred to eschew oil and easel painting for watercolour on paper. With the arrival of the Bombay Progressives like F. N. Souza and S. H. Raza, all of that changed..
Post independence, Indian artists have used watercolour to explore their own formal concerns, rather than to side with any political cause. Modernists such as K. H. Ara, M. F. Husain, Laxma Goud, H. A. Gade and S. H. Raza worked with watercolours, the latter two making a switch to oils to further their idiom. Some would intermittently return to watercolours, either creating a series of works with the medium, or delving into an old theme..