British Watercolours and Drawings: Lord Leverhulme’s Collection in the Lady Lever Art Gallery

The Lady Lever Watercolours provides a fully illustrated catalog raisonné of the important collection of over 300 British watercolors and drawings in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, which holds one of the best fine and decorative arts collections in the United Kingdom. This lavishly illustrated book will make accessible the whole collection, much of which remains unpublished since 1928. The collection illustrates the flowering of the British watercolour school in the eighteenth century and follows its development through the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. A fine collection from the eighteenth century includes works by Julius Caesar Ibbetson, Thomas Rowlandson, Francis Wheatley, John Robert Cozens, Richard Cosway, John ‘Warwick’ Smith, Francis Towne and Ozias Humphrey.

Numerically, however, the strength of the collection lies in the nineteenth century works. Jessica Feather’s meticulously researched book reveals the full glory of landscape watercolors by David Cox, Peter de Wint and JMW Turner. Outstanding figurative works include paintings by George Pinwell and Frederick Walker, and the Pre-Raphaelites are also well represented with a large number of high quality drawings by Edward Burne-Jones, as well as works by Ford Madox Brown, John Evert Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The collection also includes twenty-six studies by Edward John Gregory for his well-known painting Boulter’s Lock, Sunday Afternoon, which is also in the Lady Lever Gallery.

Gloriously illustrated throughout The Lady Lever Watercolours is a wonderful celebration of British drawings and watercolors at their finest.

The Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight on Merseyside was founded in 1922 by William Hesketh Lever, First Viscount Leverhume (1851-1925) to house the best of his personal collection put together over a period of 40 years.