A Polite Art: Watercolour Manuals for Victorian Women

A look into a 19th century trend

May 28, 2024

The 1800s saw a boom in drawing and painting technique books specifically aimed at amateur women artists. Watercolour (often spelt ‘water colour’ with a space back then) was considered a ‘polite’ art, along with needlework, music and drawing - they were suitable pastimes for a Victorian woman. As a ‘clean’ medium only requiring water, it was in opposition to oil paint with its odours and turpentine solvents which did not fit the ‘female temperament’.

One such publication was George Brookshaw’s ‘A New Treatise on Flower Painting, or, Every Lady her own Drawing Master’, published in 1816, London. In it he describes the best colours to use for flower painting, how to mix them, exercises in linework control and example plates with guidelines to help the reader.

On reading the text, there’s some archaic terms like ‘pencil’ which originally meant a small paint brush. For modern readers this sentence below might be confounding:

The first lesson is in controlling strokes with colour loaded onto your brush:

Of the colours he recommends:

Vermillion, Lake, King’s Yellow, Gamboge, Yellow Oker (Ochre), Prussian Blue, Raw Terra de Siena, Burnt Terra de Siena, Burnt Umber, and Sap Green.

It’s worth noting that genuine Gamboge is toxic and Winsor & Newton stopped producing their genuine colour in 2005, replacing it with ‘New Gamboge’. It was again reformulated in 2013 when pigments became discontinued. Gamboge or King’s Yellow can be substituted with Turner’s Yellow (W&N) . ‘Lake’ can be substituted with Scarlet Lake (W&N).