Watercolor painting - the history, masters, and characteristics of the technique

Watercolour painting is the art of painting with water-soluble pigments on paper, where the white paper itself provides the light and the colour is applied in thin, transparent layers. It is one of the oldest techniques in visual art and at the same time one of the least forgiving: a brushstroke once applied cannot be painted over, water determines as much as the hand, and the result is either luminous or muddy. This very sensitivity is why watercolour is now one of the most sought-after forms of expression when Swedes choose a painting or poster for their home – airy, light and with a presence that oil rarely achieves.

This guide follows watercolour’s journey from Albrecht Dürer’s Young Hare in Nuremberg in 1502, through the English watercolour school with Paul Sandby, Thomas Girtin and William Turner, to the Swedish breakthroughs of Anders Zorn and Carl Larsson and today’s watercolour masters such as Lars Lerin. You will learn what technically distinguishes watercolour from gouache and tempera, which works have defined the genre, which Swedish museums preserve its legacy – and how to hang watercolour’s lightness on a wall without it disappearing.

Contents
↓ What is watercolour painting?
↓ The history of watercolour – from papyrus to Dürer
↓ The English watercolour school – technique becomes art
↓ The masters and the most important works
↓ Technique, paper and pigments
↓ Swedish and Nordic watercolour painting
↓ Influence and legacy – watercolour today
↓ Watercolour at home – how to choose a subject
↓ Timeline – the development of watercolour
↓ Related art movements and artists
↓ Frequently asked questions about watercolour painting

What is watercolour painting?

Watercolour is defined by three things: pigment bound with water-soluble gum arabic, paper that shines through the paint, and a way of working in which light is preserved rather than painted in. The word comes from the Italian acquarello, from the Latin aqua, water. Unlike oil painting, in which the artist builds up the image from dark to light and can cover mistakes with a new layer, the watercolour painter works from light to dark. The whitest point in a watercolour is almost always the untouched paper.

The technique is closely related to gouache, which uses the same binding medium but with the addition of chalk or white pigment so that the paint becomes opaque. In technical terminology, the opaque variant is often called bodycolour, and many of history’s most famous watercolours – Dürer’s Young Hare is the classic example – combine the two. Tempera, which is bound with egg yolk, and ink, which is soot in water, are considered separate techniques even though they often appear under the same heading in museum collections of art on paper.

There are four main techniques in watercolor. Glazing, in which thin transparent layers are applied one over another after the previous layer has dried, provides depth and control. Wet-on-wet, in which paint is applied to already damp paper, creates soft transitions and the dramatic skies Turner became famous for. Drybrush, with minimal water dragged across coarse paper, creates texture and sparkle. Leaving areas unpainted, either by leaving the paper untouched or protecting it with masking fluid, is what makes the light in a watercolor seem to come from within the image. Many people today seek the same luminous effect in posters with nature motifs, where watercolor's lightness has become a style of its own.

Quick facts: Albrecht Dürer's Young Hare (1502) and The Great Piece of Turf (1503), both watercolor and bodycolor on paper, are held at the Albertina in Vienna; the hare entered the collection in 1691. The Society of Painters in Water-Colours, the world's first watercolor society, was founded on November 30, 1804, at Stafford Coffee House in London and received a royal charter in 1881 as the Royal Watercolour Society. William Winsor and Henry Newton launched the first moist watercolors in pans in 1832 and Chinese white in 1834. Turner's watercolor The Blue Rigi (1842) sold on June 5, 2006, for £5.8 million, a record for a British watercolor, and was saved for the Tate in 2007 after more than 11,000 private individuals donated £550,000. Anders Zorn's watercolor Our Daily Bread (1886, 68 × 102 cm) hangs at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, and his watercolor Summer Fun (1886) sold on June 3, 2010, for 26 million kronor. The Nordic Watercolour Museum in Skärhamn on Tjörn opened on June 17, 2000, and receives between 100,000 and 200,000 visitors a year.

The History of Watercolor - From Papyrus to Dürer

Water-based pigments on paper or papyrus are older than almost any other surviving form of visual art. Egyptian scribes illustrated books of the dead with mineral pigments in water and gum as early as around 1500 BC, and in China, during the Tang dynasty (618–907), ink painting on silk and rice paper developed into what is effectively the East Asian branch of watercolor. But in Europe, for more than a thousand years, watercolor remained a tool for manuscript illuminators, mapmakers, and architects - something used to explain, not to express.

Medieval Book Painting and Renaissance Studies

The miniatures in medieval manuscripts were painted with opaque watercolor on parchment, and this is where European pigment traditions were born: ultramarine from lapis lazuli, vermilion, malachite green, and gold leaf. When paper became cheaper during the 15th century, artists began using watercolor in their preparatory studies - quick notes of light and color before an oil painting or fresco. It was a working technique, rarely intended for display.

Albrecht Dürer changed that. During his travels across the Alps in 1494–1495, he painted landscape watercolors that were not studies for anything else but finished pictures in their own right – the first independent landscape watercolors in Western art. And in 1502, in his workshop in Nuremberg, he painted Young Hare, a life-size hare in which every hair is rendered with a brush so fine that one can see the reflection of light in the animal’s eye. The work was followed in 1503 by The Great Piece of Turf, a clump of earth with dandelions, bluegrass, and plantain rendered with an exactness no botanical illustration had previously achieved. Read more about the artist on our page about Albrecht Dürer.

Botany, Topography, and the Wash That Became Art

During the 17th and 18th centuries, watercolor continued in three practical contexts. Botanical illustrators such as Maria Sibylla Merian, who published her work on the insects of Suriname in 1705, used watercolor to depict plants and animals in precise colors. Military topographers learned watercolor to draw fortifications and terrain; as a drawing instructor at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, Paul Sandby trained an entire generation of English watercolorists from 1768 onward. The third tradition was the wash drawing, in which the artist drew with a pen and then applied thin tones of bistre or ink. You can read about how the botanical tradition developed into a genre of its own on the page about botanical art.

The English Watercolor School – Technique Becomes Art

It was in England, between approximately 1750 and 1850, that watercolor developed from a craft into an art form, and the reason was as much social as artistic. The English upper class’s educational journey, the Grand Tour, created demand for souvenir images of Italy and the Alps. Paper was easy to carry, the paint dried quickly, and the new interest in the picturesque landscape meant that a watercolor from the Lake District could hang in a drawing room without being considered modest. Paul Sandby, one of the founders of the Royal Academy in 1768, is often called the father of English watercolor precisely because he showed that the technique could carry an entire landscape.

Girtin, Cozens, and the Pure Wash

Thomas Girtin, born in the same year as Turner, 1775, and dying as early as 1802 at the age of 27, was the one who freed watercolor from the pen strokes of the wash drawing. Instead of first drawing outlines and then adding color, Girtin built his landscapes directly with broad, transparent washes of warm brown, blue, and gray, on coarse paper that allowed the light to remain on the surface. Turner is said to have remarked that if Tom Girtin had lived, he himself would have starved. John Robert Cozens, whose alpine watercolors from the 1770s and 1780s led John Constable to call him “the greatest genius in landscape,” showed how a watercolor could convey mood rather than information.

A Society of Its Own – 1804

The Royal Academy still regarded watercolour as something for amateurs and ladies, and hung watercolours in inferior rooms at its exhibitions. On 30 November 1804, Robert Hills, William Henry Pyne, Samuel Shelley, and William Frederick Wells therefore gathered at Stafford Coffee House on Oxford Street in London and founded the Society of Painters in Water-Colours. Its first independent exhibition in 1805 attracted around 12,000 visitors and became a commercial breakthrough. The society lives on today as the Royal Watercolour Society, with a royal charter since 1881, and is the world's oldest watercolour society.

Turner – watercolour as light

Joseph Mallord William Turner took the technique where no one had gone before. He scraped the paper with his fingernail and the tip of a knife to bring out white sparks, worked wet-on-wet until the sky and water became a single dissolving movement, and used watercolour's transparency to paint light itself rather than the surfaces on which the light fell. At his death in 1851, he left around 37,500 sketches and watercolours to the British state, a donation that today forms the core of Tate Britain's collection and which the museum is in the process of fully cataloguing in connection with the 250th anniversary of his birth. Our page about William Turner explores his storms and sunsets in greater depth.

The Masters and the Most Important Works

The canon of watercolour is shorter than that of oil painting, because paper is light-sensitive and museums can rarely keep the works on permanent display. Here are the works that have defined what a watercolour can be.

Albrecht Dürer – Young Hare (1502)

An animal, a blank sheet of paper, and a light coming from the left. Dürer's hare measures 25.1 × 22.6 cm, painted with watercolour and bodycolour, and signed with the famous AD monogram beneath the date 1502. The work remained in Dürer's studio until his death in 1528, was purchased by the Nuremberg patrician Willibald Imhoff, sold in 1588 to Emperor Rudolf II, and ended up in 1691 in the collection that became the Albertina in Vienna. For conservation reasons, the original is displayed only for a few months every five years; in the meantime, the museum displays a facsimile. The fact that the image remains Austria's most reproduced work of art says something about why the watercolour's precision has never gone out of fashion.

William Turner – The Blue Rigi (1842)

The Rigi mountain by Lake Lucerne at dawn, painted in a single blue tone that shifts from almost white to deep indigo. Turner painted three versions of the Rigi - the blue, the red, and the dark - and the blue is considered the pinnacle of his watercolour art. When it was sold at Christie's on 5 June 2006 for £5.8 million, it became the most expensive British watercolour ever. An export ban was issued, Tate was able to purchase it for £4.95 million, and in 2007 it could be hung in London after a fundraising campaign in which the Art Fund gave £500,000 and more than 11,000 private individuals contributed £550,000. Since 2007, Tate has held all three Rigi watercolours in the same collection.

Anders Zorn - Our Daily Bread (1886)

A group of women and children take a break by a field in Mora, potatoes boil over an open fire, and in the foreground sits Zorn's own grandmother. The work, 68 × 102 cm, was created after the Nationalmuseum encouraged 26-year-old Zorn to paint a "patriotic" subject, and today it is perhaps the museum's most admired watercolor. By then, Zorn had already shown that watercolor could do everything oil could: Summer Recreation, painted the same year at Dalarö, shows his wife Emma and a man in a rowing boat amid a shimmer of sunlight that is pure technique - reserved paper, wet-on-wet, and drybrush in the same image. When Summer Recreation was sold at Stockholms Auktionsverk on June 3, 2010, for 26 million kronor, it was the highest price ever paid for a Swedish work of art at auction in Sweden.

"Watercolor is the most difficult of all techniques, for it tolerates no regret." - attributed to Anders Zorn, reproduced in the Zorn Museum's collection catalogue

Carl Larsson - A Home (1894-1899)

Twenty-six watercolors from Lilla Hyttnäs in Sundborn, published in book form by Bonniers in 1899 and now in the Nationalmuseum's collection. The Flower Window, The Cosy Corner, Mama's and the Little Girls' Room, and Catching Crayfish have for more than a hundred years been archetypes of Swedish interiors: white furniture, red and green paneling, textiles by Karin Larsson, and children in motion. Larsson chose watercolor deliberately - the technique suited the bright, airy home better than the heaviness of oil, and it could be reproduced in print so that the images could reach far beyond the museum. In practice, it was the first Swedish series of images to become interior design, and our page about Carl Larsson tells how it came about.

John Singer Sargent - Watercolors from Venice and the Alps

Around 1907, the American society portraitist John Singer Sargent grew tired of commissioned portraits and devoted the rest of his life to watercolor - around 2,000 sheets from Venice, Corfu, and the Alps. In 1909, the Brooklyn Museum bought 83 of his watercolors at once, and in 1912 the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston bought 45. Sargent showed that watercolor could be as quick, assured, and sensual as the Impressionists' oils.

Technique, paper, and pigments

No other painting technique is so dependent on its material. An oil painting can essentially be made on anything; a watercolor is just as much the work of the paper as of the brush. That is why the history of watercolor is also the history of paper mills, paint factories, and chemistry.

The paper – 100 percent cotton and three surfaces

High-quality watercolor paper is made from cotton linters, not wood pulp, and is internally and externally sized with gelatin so that the water remains on the surface long enough for the paint to be controlled. It is specified in grams per square meter: 185 g is thin and must be stretched, 300 g is standard, and 640 g can withstand wet-on-wet without buckling. The surface comes in three varieties: hot-pressed (smooth, for details and botanical art), cold-pressed (lightly textured, the most common), and rough (for dry-brush work and landscapes). The English paper mill Whatman, founded in Kent in the 1740s, produced the first wove paper without laid lines from the mould in 1757, and it is no coincidence that the English watercolor school emerged during the same decades. Turner, Girtin, and Cozens all painted on Whatman.

Paint – from dry cakes to moist pans

Until the 18th century, every artist ground their own pigments in gum arabic. In 1766, William Reeves in London began selling ready-made, dry watercolor cakes that were moistened with a brush, an invention that made the technique accessible to traveling amateurs and was rewarded by the Society of Arts in 1781. The next step was taken by the chemist William Winsor and the artist Henry Newton, who in 1832 launched moist watercolor paints in small porcelain pans – the pans still used today – and in 1834 introduced Chinese white, a zinc white that made it possible to place light tones over dark ones without the paint becoming chalky. From 1846, paint came in metal tubes, and watercolor could be taken into the landscape on the same terms as oil paint.

Light, transparency, and the irreversible

What makes a watercolor luminous is that light passes through the layer of paint, strikes the white paper, and is reflected back through the pigment. The more layers there are, the less light returns, which is why the most skillful watercolor is often the one that does the least: two or three washes, plenty of white paper, and a decision about where the darkness should lie before the brush is dipped. The irreversibility of the technique is also part of its aesthetic: the viewer sees the speed of the hand and the randomness of the water as part of the image. If you want to understand how that movement is experienced up close, a good starting point is our guide to the authenticity effect – original versus reproduction.

Swedish and Nordic watercolor painting

Few countries have such a strong watercolor tradition relative to their size as Sweden, and it is due to two men born seven years apart in Dalarna and Stockholm: Carl Larsson (1853) and Anders Zorn (1860). But the tradition is both older and broader than that.

Egron Lundgren and the traveling watercolorists of the 19th century

Egron Lundgren (1815–1875) from Stockholm is the pioneer of Swedish watercolor. After studying in Paris and spending twelve years in Italy and Spain, he followed the British army in India in 1858 as a war artist and became one of the English watercolor school's most respected foreign members; Queen Victoria bought his works, and the Nationalmuseum now holds several hundred of his watercolors. It was Lundgren who showed a Swedish audience that watercolor could be major art, and it was his English contacts who brought the British technique – transparent washes on coarse paper – to Sweden.

Zorn – watercolor's Swedish world star

Anders Zorn painted almost exclusively in watercolor until 1887, when, during a stay in St Ives in Cornwall, he switched to oil. The seven years preceding that were the high point of Swedish watercolor: Our Daily Bread, Summer Pleasure, Boat Race and the London scenes from the mid-1880s display a technical mastery that no one in Europe surpassed at the time. The Zorn Museum in Mora, opened in 1939, together with the Nationalmuseum preserves most of his watercolors, and when Bukowskis in Stockholm sold the oil painting Sunday Morning for SEK 35.25 million, a new record for Swedish art was set – but it was watercolor that made his name. His entire career, from Mora to Paris and back, is covered on our page about Anders Zorn.

The Nordic Watercolor Museum – a museum for a single medium

The fact that Sweden has the world's only major museum dedicated to watercolor says something about the status of the medium here. The Nordic Watercolor Museum in Skärhamn on Tjörn opened on June 17, 2000, following an architectural competition in 1996 that, with 386 submitted proposals, was the largest in the Nordic region up to that point; the winners, Danes Niels Bruun and Henrik Corfitsen, designed a long red building on the rocks by Bottnafjorden. The museum receives between 100,000 and 200,000 visitors a year, regularly acquires contemporary Nordic watercolors, and in 2026 is showing a summer exhibition with Asger Jorn and Per Kirkeby (May 10–September 6), followed by Britta Marakatt-Labba's watercolors and drawings in autumn and winter 2026–2027. On the other side of Lake Vänern, in Karlstad, Lars Lerin opened the Sandgrund art gallery in 2012 with his own works – Lerin, born in 1954 in Munkfors, is now regarded as the Nordic region's foremost watercolorist, with gray-toned winter landscapes and abandoned houses in formats often exceeding one meter. The broader picture of how Nordic light has shaped our art can be found on the page about Nordic art.

Influence and legacy - watercolour today

Watercolour has never had its own "ism" - it is a technique, not a movement - but it has accompanied almost all of them. From 1900 to 1906, Cézanne painted watercolours of Mont Sainte-Victoire in which the patches of colour lie freely on the paper, and it was those sheets that showed the Cubists how a form can be built from colour instead of contour. Emil Nolde secretly made around 1,300 small watercolours during the ban on painting from 1938 to 1945, and Paul Klee used watercolour's transparency for the layered colour squares that became his signature at the Bauhaus.

In Sweden, the technique has had an unbroken line from Zorn via Bruno Liljefors, who painted his birds in watercolour before they became oil paintings, to Carl Fredrik Hill, whose drawings and watercolours from his years of illness in Lund, 1883–1911 - around 3,500 sheets - are now regarded as some of the most important preparatory works of Swedish modernism. Read about them on our pages about Carl Fredrik Hill and the Romanticism that shaped his early landscapes, Romanticism. And Japanese woodblock printing, whose flat fields of colour and empty spaces have influenced Western art since the 1860s, is based on the same principle as watercolour: the paper as light, the colour as a glaze. That connection is explained on the page about Japanese art and ukiyo-e.

Today, watercolour is the most requested painting technique in print. The reason is simple: the original is already pigment on paper, so a poster after a watercolour comes closer to the original than a poster after an oil painting ever can.

Watercolour at home - how to choose a subject

The strength of a watercolour on a wall is its lightness, and that is also its weakness. A pale watercolour on a white wall can disappear completely, while the same image on a dark grey or green wall suddenly shines.

Wall colour and a mount do the work

A watercolor needs space around it. A wide, white mat – at least 5 cm, preferably 8 – recreates the white paper around the subject and gives the color something to glow against. The frame should be thin and light: oak, ash, or white-painted wood. Black frames work only with powerful watercolors such as those by Zorn or Lerin. Since 2024, we have seen more and more people choosing to hang light watercolors on colored walls – sage green, terracotta, dark blue – and this is the single biggest change in how the technique is used in interior design. Our guide to posters for dark walls goes through exactly which combinations work.

Room by room

In the bedroom, watercolor’s soft transitions work best of all: a haze over water, a pale botanical study, a toned sky in two colors. In the living room, a watercolor can be larger and bolder – a 50 × 70 cm landscape or a series of three botanical leaves in the same frame creates a calm focal point without dominating. In the hallway, detailed watercolors in the style of Dürer work well because you pass close by. The bathroom and kitchen are the rooms where a watercolor print is actually preferable to an original, since moisture is the enemy of paper art. Read more in our guide to choosing the right art for your home.

Tip: Never hang a watercolor – original or print – in direct sunlight. Pigments on paper fade faster than oil paint, and a south-facing window can noticeably alter an image within a couple of years. Choose a wall that receives indirect daylight, use UV-protective glass if you frame it yourself, and consider combining two or three watercolors in the same light frame style so that the lightness becomes an intentional whole rather than something that looks insubstantial. A wide mat does more for a watercolor than any frame.

At Bozetto, you’ll find watercolor subjects across several collections – airy botanical posters in the spirit of Dürer and Merian, classic landscapes and figurative subjects among posters by famous artists, and light tones in beige posters that work especially well against colored walls. How you put them together is covered in our guide to creating a gallery wall.

Timeline – the development of watercolor

Ca 1500 BC – Egyptian scribes illustrate books of the dead with water-based mineral pigments on papyrus.

1494–1495 – Albrecht Dürer paints Europe’s first independent watercolor landscapes during his journey across the Alps.

1502–1503 – Dürer paints The Hare and The Great Piece of Turf in Nuremberg; both are now held at the Albertina in Vienna.

1705 – Maria Sibylla Merian publishes Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium with watercolor plates.

1757 – James Whatman produces the first wove paper, which becomes the support for the English watercolor school.

1766 – William Reeves sells the first ready-made watercolor cakes in London.

1804 – The Society of Painters in Water-Colours is founded on 30 November in London; its first exhibition takes place in 1805.

1832–1834 – Winsor & Newton launches moist watercolor paints in pans and Chinese white.

1842 – Turner paints The Blue Rigi, now at Tate Britain.

1858 – Egron Lundgren accompanies the British army in India and becomes Sweden's first internationally recognized watercolorist.

1886 – Anders Zorn paints Our Daily Bread and Summer Pleasure.

1899 – Carl Larsson's A Home, with 26 watercolors, is published by Bonniers.

1909 – Brooklyn Museum buys 83 watercolors by John Singer Sargent.

2000 – The Nordic Watercolor Museum opens on 17 June in Skärhamn on Tjörn.

2007 – Tate acquires The Blue Rigi following a fundraising campaign with over 11,000 donors.

2010 – Zorn's Summer Pleasure sells for 26 million kronor at Stockholm Auktionsverk.

2012 – Lars Lerin opens the Sandgrund art gallery in Karlstad.

2025–2026 – Tate Britain celebrates Turner's 250th anniversary and presents Turner and Constable from 27 November 2025–12 April 2026.

Related art movements and artists

Watercolor runs through the entire history of art, and several of our fact pages explore its different aspects in greater depth. Albrecht Dürer gave the technique its first masterpieces, William Turner transformed it into light, and Anders Zorn and Carl Larsson gave it a Swedish home. Anyone who wants to understand watercolor subjects in a broader context can find more on the pages about landscape painting, botanical art, and marine painting. All our fact pages about artists, movements, and genres are collected in Bozetto's knowledge base.

If you want to consult the sources, Dürer's hare is featured in the Albertina's collection presentation, Turner's watercolors in the Tate's Turner 250, Zorn's Our Daily Bread in the Nationalmuseum collection database, and the museum's own history on the Nordic Watercolor Museum.

Frequently asked questions about watercolor painting

From Dürer’s hare to Zorn’s sunlit shimmer, watercolor has shown for more than five hundred years that light can be painted with almost nothing - water, pigment, and a white sheet of paper. If you would like to bring that lightness home, you will find luminous landscapes, botanical studies, and old masters among posters by famous artists at Bozetto.