Great British Watercolors from the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art Great British Watercolors brings together more than eighty outstanding works spanning a century of British artistic production, the emergence of watercolor painting in the mid-eighteenth century to its flowering in the early nineteenth century. The exhibition highlights the diversity of British watercolor painting, showing both landscapes and figurative works by some of the principal artists who worked in the medium, including Thomas Gainsborough, Paul Sandby, John Robert Cozens, William Blake, Thomas Girtin, J. M. W. Turner, and John Constable. This exhibition has been organized by the Yale Center for British Art in association with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, as part of the 2007 celebrations commemorating both the Center's thirtieth anniversary and the centenary of its founder, Paul Mellon. It also traveled to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.   Sun, Wind, and Rain: The Art of David Cox 16 OCTOBER — 4 JANUARY, 2009 This autumn the Yale Center for British Art will be the first and only U.S. venue for a major retrospective of David Cox (1783-1859). Marking the 150th anniversary of the artists death, Sun, Wind, and Rain: The Art of David Cox examines the work of this important figure in the development of British landscape and watercolor painting. The first significant exhibition devoted to his work since 1983, it includes more than one hundred of his watercolors and drawings and approximately a dozen oil paintings. The works are drawn from the Center's collection, as well as from public and private collections in Great Britain and the United States. Sun, Wind, and Rain: The Art of David Cox has been co-organized with Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, U.K., where it will be on view in early 2009. The exhibition takes its title from one of Coxs best-known watercolors, painted in 1845. Showing a farmer and his wife riding through stormy open ry as a distant train crosses the horizon, Sun, Wind, and Rain (Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery) is emblematic of the concerns with the representation of light and atmosphere and weather that lie at the heart of his landscape art.