Great British Watercolors from the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art 10 JUNE — 17 AUGUST, 2008 Spanning more than a century of British artistic production, the emergence of watercolor painting in the mid-eighteenth century to its flowering in the early nineteenth century, Great British Watercolors brings together more than eighty outstanding works from the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art. This 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. Great British Watercolors was 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, one of the greatest cultural philanthropists of the twentieth century. In a period of little over fifteen years, beginning in the early 1960s, Mr. Mellon assembled one of the world's greatest collections of British drawings and watercolors. As part of his extensive collecting, he purchased several distinguished private collections of British watercolors, enriching and expanding them with astute purchases reflecting his own taste. In his memoirs he praised "the beauty and freshness of English drawings and watercolors, their immediacy and sureness of technique, their comprehensiveness of subject matter, their vital qualities, their Englishness." Mr. Mellon's interest and collecting helped to revive the study of British watercolors. Through his beneficent gift of his collection to Yale, the Center houses more than 50,000 drawings, watercolors, and printsthe largest and most representative collection of British art on paper outside the United Kingdom. Great British Watercolors has been organized by the Yale Center for British Art in association with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. The exhibition has been curated by Scott Wilcox, Curator of Prints and Drawings, Yale Center for British Art, Mitchell Merling, Paul Mellon Curator and Head of the Department of European Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Matthew Hargraves, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Paintings and Sculpture, Yale Center for British Art. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue by Matthew Hargraves, with an introduction by Scott Wilcox, copublished by the Yale Center for British Art and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in association with Yale University Press. Great British Watercolors was on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts from July 1 to September 30, 2007, and at the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia from October 23, 2007 to January 13, 2008. The Center is its final venue.