The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) is presenting the exhibition “Picturing Nature: The Stuart Collection of 18th- and 19th-Century British Landscapes and Beyond.” On view are more than 70 watercolors, drawings, prints, and oil sketches created by such talents as John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, Paul Sandby, Thomas Gainsborough, Richard Wilson, John Robert Cozens, Samuel Palmer, and John Sell Cotman.
The museum has acquired all of them since 2015, when Francita Stuart Koelsch Ulmer established the Stuart Collection in memory of her parents, Robert Cummins Stuart and Frances Wells Stuart. The family has long been engaged with both the MFAH and British art: Ulmer’s great-grandmother helped found the museum in the 1920s, and Ulmer inherited a Constable oil sketch from her grandmother.
The collection highlights Britain’s “golden age of watercolor” and artists’ shift in attention from topographical and descriptive landscape scenes toward intensely personal treatments of nature. They were responding not only to such Romantic poets as William Wordsworth, but also to their era’s rapid industrialization, which produced an urban middle class who increasingly sought refuge in rural settings. From the late 18th century onward, British artists earned global acclaim for their innovative techniques in watercolor, raising its status from a preparatory medium to a prestigious artform in its own right.
The Stuart Collection’s guiding hand, MFAH curator Dena M. Woodall, notes that the museum owned only a handful of British drawings before this initiative began. She has sought to obtain multiple examples by key artists, as well as pairs of works created by a teacher and his student, such as Francis Towne and John White Abbott. The collection’s cornerstone is the oil sketch illustrated here, which showcases Constable’s mastery of fleeting atmospheric effects.
On View: “Picturing Nature”
Museum of Fine Arts Houston
mfah.org
through July 6, 2025
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