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pictorial kind. Even in England there was a precedent in the water-colour work of Gainsborough, who had made important experiments in this manner of practice. These earlier examples, slight as they were, pointed a direction in which much might be accomplished, and were distinctly inspiring in the suggestions they made to artists who were seeking the way out of a rather dull convention.

It was during the first half of the eighteenth century that the signs of the new purpose in British water-colour painting began to be definitely perceptible. Some of the topographical draughtsmen – the names of William Taverner, Samuel Scott, and John Joshua Kirby may be particularly mentioned – showed a certain inclination towards more personal modes of expression than were customary at that moment. Their attempts to be unconventional were timid enough, but they counted for something as evidences of a desire to substitute the actual study of nature for a dry formality which had in it scarcely any trace of naturalism.