In a watercolor, the paper does part of the painting. Left bare, it becomes the brightest light in the picture, and once it is covered it cannot be won back. Twelve sheets below show what painters did with that rule, from a mountain paid for one brushstroke at a time to five animals that needed a new title to explain their color.
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How These Were Chosen
Watercolor is pigment bound with gum arabic, thinned with water and laid on paper in transparent layers. Each wash lets the one beneath show through. In the pure technique there is no white paint, so every highlight is bare paper, planned before the first stroke.
Paper was cheap and a wash dried in minutes, so watercolor long served for studies, travel sketches and field records, a rank below oil. In 1804, London painters who felt slighted by the Royal Academy founded a society that showed only watercolors.
The rule here follows from the medium. Each sheet is by a different artist and turns on what was done with the paper: left bare, scraped back, cut up, tinted or covered over. They run from the most recent to the oldest.
12. John Singer Sargent, Muddy Alligators (1917)
Five alligators lie along a swampy bank, their hides so pale they look almost white. John Singer Sargent painted them in 1917 on a thick sheet of cream paper. He had come to Florida in February to paint John D. Rockefeller, then stayed near Miami at Vizcaya, the Italian style villa that James Deering, half brother of his old friend Charles, was building.
Those pale hides are the cream paper itself. Before he laid in the swamp, Sargent masked the shapes of the bodies so the color could not reach them, and elsewhere he scraped dry paint away to uncover the paper again. Around the animals he let the color pool and dry where it fell, and a few broken strokes give each one its weight.
The trick left him with a problem. Live alligators are dark, close to black, and Sargent wrote to a friend that they "don't make very interesting pictures." His pale ones needed an explanation. The Worcester Art Museum, which bought the sheet that same year, had it on record simply as Alligators.
So in June 1917, Sargent wrote to Worcester with a better title: "It might be well to call the alligator one Muddy Alligators to explain their whiteness." With one added word, the bare paper became a coat of dried mud.
At a Glance
Artist: John Singer Sargent (1856 to 1925)
Painted: 1917
Medium: Watercolor over graphite, with masking and scraping, on cream wove paper
Size: 34.4 × 53 cm (13.5 × 20.9 in)
Where to see it: Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts
11. Paul Klee, Hammamet with Its Mosque (1914)
Near the top of a small, almost square sheet, a mosque stands between two towers above a ground broken into triangles of buff and pink, and a red band runs along the upper edge.
Paul Klee, a Swiss born painter based in Munich, painted the view outside the walls of Hammamet, on the coast of Tunisia, on April 14, 1914. He was traveling with two painter friends, August Macke and Louis Moilliet. Yet the red band at the top was not where Klee had painted it that day.