Page:The practice of water-colour painting (IA cu31924014501971).pdf/19

between local conditions and artistic development could be multiplied; they are common enough in the record of the art of the world.

Therefore, it is not unreasonable to seek to account for the remarkable growth of the British water-colour school by reference to the influences to which it has been subjected here. Among the chief of these influences is that of climate; the humid, insular atmosphere in which we live is peculiarly helpful to the water-colour painter in more ways than one. It provides him with a great deal of subject matter that lends itself well to interpretation by means of a dainty and luminous medium – landscape motives that require exceptional subtlety of colour treatment, and atmospheric effects that are exquisitely delicate in their gradations of tone and in their elusive variety of suggestion. It gives him pictorial material that no other technical process can so efficiently translate, and that needs especially for its proper expression the inherent lightness and transparency of the water-colour wash.

But most of all, perhaps, the insular climate