The remarkable Spooner collection of early British watercolors is one of the finest of its kind and will be exhibited for the first time since 1958 at the Hermitage Rooms, Somerset House, November 17-February 12. This rare opportunity will present some 80 works, including outstanding landscape and figurative subjects by Thomas Gainsborough, Paul Sandby, Francis Towne, Alexander and J.R. Cozens, Thomas Girtin, John Constable, John Sell Cotman and J.M.W. Turner, as well as numerous fine works by lesser-known artists, many never previously exhibited.

The exhibition, titled “Gainsborough to Turner: British Watercolors from the Spooner Collection,” spans the “golden age” of watercolor painting from around 1750 to 1850 and demonstrates the inventiveness and imagination of artists working in the medium during this extraordinary period of British art.

William Wycliffe Spooner (1882-1967) was the eldest son of Dr William Archibald Spooner, the celebrated Warden of New College, Oxford. An engineer and inventor of an industrial drying process, he had always been interested in art and acquired his first drawings while still struggling to make his mark as an engineer. Although he had a good eye for drawings, he had little interest in art scholarship and took guidance from friends and dealers and especially from his wife, Mercie, whom he married in 1955, and whose wide knowledge of the London art market was invaluable to the formation of the collection. Spooner’s close friendship with Sir John Witt led him to bequeath the collection to the Courtauld Institute of Art on his death in 1967.

A key work in the exhibition is one of Spooner’s early purchases, Edward Dayes’ “Somerset House from the Thames.” The fact that this picture will now be on display in the very building depicted would no doubt have given him immense pleasure.

Spooner’s abiding love was for the countryside, which can be seen from the numerous images kf mountains, lakes and rivers in the collection, exemplified by Francis Towne’s panoramic Welsh vistas and Cozen’s dramatic Alpine view, “In the Canton of Unterwalden.” Spooner owned a house near Dove Cottage in Grasmere and his affection for the Lake District led him to purchase two magnificent views of Borrowdale and Siddaw by John White Abbott.

John Warwick Smith (1749-1831), “On the Side of Lake Lugano,” circa 1781, graphite, watercolor, pen and ink and body-color on paper, 171/3 by 121/8 inches.

Spooner’s choice of subject matter is reflected in theexhibition’s themes through which the theory and practice ofBritish watercolor are explored. The first room containsarchitectural images, among them watercolors of London and theThames.

Rural landscapes dominate the collection, as evident from the following two rooms in which the treatment of nature is investigated, from Gainsborough’s “invented” compositions of woods, cattle and sheep of the early 1780s to closely observed river scenes made “on the spot” in Wales by William James Muller some 60 years later. Cozen’s symbolic “Blasted Tree in a Landscape” is one of a number of drawings in a section focusing on trees.

The exhibition concludes with seascapes and figurative groups, among them seven by Rowlandson whose work Spooner enjoyed. As a guide to the technical development of watercolor, key works are highlighted throughout the exhibition. The Eighteenth Century view of watercolor as a less serious art than oil painting persists to this day. The power and quality of the images shown in this exhibition, however, dispel any notion of watercolor as unglamorous and instead demonstrate the aesthetic appeal and beauty of the medium.

The exhibition, a collaboration between the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, California and the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, will be held in the Hermitage Rooms at Somerset House.

For information, somerset-house.org.uk.