HOUSTON, TX.- The 18th and 19th centuries in Britain came to be known as the golden age of watercolor. During this era, artists shifted from topographical and picturesque depictions of the landscape to intensely personal treatments of nature, echoing the approaches of William Blake, William Wordsworth and other Romantic poets of the period. British artists also innovated the watercolor technique, raising its status as an art form. From January 12 to July 6, 2025 the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston will present the exhibition Picturing Nature: The Stuart Collection of 18th- and 19th Century British Landscapes and Beyond, featuring over 70 watercolors, drawings, prints, and oil sketches by John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, and other artists whose work exemplifies the flowering of landscape drawing, including Paul Sandby, Thomas Gainsborough, Richard Wilson, John Robert Cozens and Samuel Palmer.

These exceptional landscapes have been acquired by the MFAH since 2015 when Houstonian Francita Stuart Koelsch Ulmer established the Stuart Collection in memory of her parents, Robert Cummins Stuart and Frances Wells Stuart.

“Francita Stuart Koelsch Ulmer’s family is truly a Texas legacy, with 200 years of history here. Her great-grandmother was a member of the founding organization of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in the 1920s,” commented Gary Tinterow, MFAH director and Margaret Alkek Williams chair. “Francita was captivated by the beauty of England many years ago, inheriting a John Constable oil sketch of the River Stour from her grandmother. We are so grateful to Francita for honoring the Museum by funding these extraordinary acquisitions in tribute to her parents.”

“It has been a privilege to collaboratively work with Francita in building this collection over the past ten years,” commented Dena M. Woodall, curator, prints and drawings, at the MFAH. “The Museum had only a handful of British drawings before this initiative began and the Stuart Collection has now become a hallmark at our institution. A couple of aims of the collection have been acquiring pairs of works by a given artist, including Thomas Girtin and J.M.W. Turner, to provide further insight into their working process and artistic growth, and acquiring pairs of watercolors by a teacher and his student, such as Francis Towne and John White Abbott. On a broader level, the landscapes in the Stuart Collection raise social and historical issues that characterize this era of immense transformation, which witnessed rapid industrialization and the emergence of a middle class that sought refuge in rural settings, as seen in John Sell Cotman’s The Anglers (in Avon Gorge) or Thomas Rowlandson’s Port Isaac, Cornwall.”

The subject of landscape was first brought to England in the late 1500s by traveling Netherlandish artists, and the practice fused with Britain’s established cartographic tradition. Later, as young men of the British elite expanded their formal education by pursuing the Grand Tour of Europe, exposure to the Continent’s varied customs and its cultural legacies of classical antiquity and the Renaissance influenced their tastes as art patrons. British artists followed suit, wandering with and without sponsorship to be inspired by ancient ruins, the Italian countryside and the majesty of the Alps. By the late 18th century, the subject of landscape had developed in England into a distinct genre; during the 19th century, the landscape tradition was elevated to its highest level, attracting international response and inspiring both artists and collectors at home and abroad.

The Stuart Collection, developed at the Museum over the past ten years, contains some 70 works to date— drawings, watercolors, prints, oil sketches and a mid-19th century Winsor & Newton watercolor box. Its cornerstone is Constable’s A View on the Banks of the River Stour (1809-16), an oil sketch that showcases the artist’s mastery at capturing fleeting atmospheric effects as he sketched in open air.