LONDON.- Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Cornwall attended a reception to celebrate the launch of The Watercolour World, of which she is a joint patron with His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales, at the Royal Academy of Arts on Thursday 31 January 2019.

The Watercolour World (TWW), is a new online project which uses an overlooked artform to help reveal the world as it looked before photography.

Before the invention of the portable camera, most accurate visual records of the world were made in watercolour. While a huge number of these images still exist, they are fragile, inaccessible, and are increasingly being lost. There is an urgent need to save them and to make them available to a wider public.

The free, interactive website will act as a unique gateway to the global collection of documentary watercolours made before 1900 in both public and private hands. Users can search either by place or by subjects covering topography, botany, zoology, historic events and human activities and achievements of all kinds.

The project already comprises around 80,000 images, many of which have been digitised for the first time by The Watercolour World. Among the highlights are 19th-century paintings of the tomb of Seti I, which were used to create full-scale reconstructions of the ancient Egyptian site, and a wide range of images showing the long-term effects of climate change such as coastal erosion along England’s south coast and glacial retreat in the Alps.

The Watercolour World is the brainchild of Fred Hohler, the British former diplomat who founded the Public Catalogue Foundation in 2002, of which The Duchess of Cornwall was a patron, which photographed and published oil paintings in public ownership in Britain for the first time.

His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales is himself an accomplished watercolourist as was his great-great-great grandmother Queen Victoria whose watercolours are featured on the Watercolour World website. Her paintings captured important private and personal events, from portraits of her husband Prince Albert and the pastimes of the royal children to views of the towns and cities that she toured to at home and abroad. The project shines a light on the hundreds of women artists who were talented watercolourists including Maria Sibylla Merian, Susan Fereday and Mrs Delany.

The Watercolour World is wholly funded by The Marandi Foundation, a London-based charity chaired by British entrepreneurs and philanthropists Javad and Narmina Marandi who attended the reception.

Javad Marandi, Chairman of the Advisory Board, said: "Watercolours are a priceless record of the world before photography. Many of them would be of great interest to historians, scientists and members of the general public, but are hidden from view and at risk of disappearing. We are proud to be supporting The Watercolour World project as it shines a critically important new light on the world's historical record."

Fred Hohler, Founder of The Watercolour World said: “The Watercolour World will offer an extraordinary journey into the world in earlier times, to encounter our predecessors, and to observe how they lived, loved and played. With the world at risk from climate change, rising sea levels, and worse, the project will provide scientists and environmentalists with an accurate visual account of much of the natural world as it used to be. And to conservationists and historians, it will provide the evidence to conserve and rebuild structures, to find lost places and to see the roots of human progress.”