Eighteenth-century British draftsmen abroad.

When Charles Rogers (1711-1784), a connoisseur and collector, published A Collection of Prints in Imitation of Drawings in 1778, he stated that "it must be unquestionably allowed that Drawing is the Fountain from which all the imitative Arts have issued." (1) Rogers was more interested in the drawings of the old masters than those of his contemporaries, but drawing played a fundamental role in the attempts of British artists of the eighteenth century to establish a national school of art and to take their rightful place alongside the old masters. Drawing was at the heart of an artist's training, central to his practice, and, as the status of the artist increased, it was valued increasingly as the purest expression of his genius.

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If drawings could provide unique access to the wellsprings of creative genius, they could also serve the more utilitarian purpose of documenting the expanding world of a rising maritime and colonial power. Artists were recruited to record the far-flung reaches of empire, and no entourage of a wealthy grand tourist, no commercial mission to a distant capital, and no scientific voyage of exploration was complete without its draftsman. While the documentary works they produced were seldom accorded the status of high art, they offered aesthetic pleasure as well as practical information. As the century progressed, the topographical draftsman evolved into the expressive landscape painter in watercolors.

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As an island people, the British have always been inveterate travelers. Thomas Rowlandson's Dutch Packet in a Rising Breeze (Pl. I) and John "Warwick" Smith's Bay Scene in Moonlight (Pl. VI) celebrate travel by sea. (2) For such a keen observer of all aspects of contemporary life as Rowlandson, ships and sailors as well as the bustling life and lowlife of ports and harbors were inexhaustible sources of subject matter. His shipboard view of a Dutch packet boat crossing the Channel conveys vividly both the exhilaration and the discomfort inherent in such a crossing. It was the result of a visit he made to Holland and Germany in 1791. John "Warwick" Smith was one of the key figures in the transformation of topographical drawing into watercolor painting. His moonlit scene attempts to capture in watercolor the type of atmospheric view that the French painter Claude Joseph Vernet (1714-1789) had made popular in oils.

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For most British travelers in the eighteenth century, travel meant the grand tour--an extended round of sightseeing on the Continent, usually with Rome as the ultimate destination, that was regarded as a necessary component in the complete education of a gentleman. As Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), who never did make the trip himself, put it in 1776: