British Qualities: Works on Paper, 1875-1930

Forty-eight prints, drawings and watercolors by two dozen British artists will follow the developments in the graphic arts during the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Noticeably absent are the revolutionary trends that wrenched French and German art toward modernism in this same period. The British evolved, rather, from their home-grown landscape traditions of Turner and Constable and from the crystalline figurative style of the Pre-Raphaelites. The results were insular, independent and united only by common devotion to excellence in draftsmanship and the printer's craft. Led in the early period by supremely talented American expatriates, James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent, England nurtured the idiosyncratic talents of Frank Short, Muirhead Bone, Frank Brangwyn, David Young Cameron and William Russell Flint whose contributions to English art were recognized with eventual knighthoods.