Book: The Theory and Practice of Landscape Painting in Water-Colours

Overview
Robert Browning Hamilton’s 1900 manual presents a clear, workmanlike guide to making landscape water-colours that are both technically sound and poetically observed. Addressed to students and serious amateurs, it balances principle with practice: how to furnish a kit, handle the brush, build a picture, and, above all, see nature in terms of tone, colour, and simplified masses. The book’s essential theme is unity: truthful observation brought under a disciplined method so that freshness and spontaneity arise from preparation rather than chance.

Materials and Setup
Hamilton begins by demystifying equipment. Paper is treated as a first principle, with advice on choosing the right surface for different effects and on stretching to prevent cockling. He reviews brushes and their uses, distinguishing the flexibility and point needed for clean washes from the firmness useful in textural passages. His guidance on pigments stresses permanence and clarity; students are warned against fugitive lakes and urged to prefer reliable earths and blues that keep mixtures luminous. Mediums and additives are treated sparingly, with the recommendation that control of water and timing matters more than recipes.

Seeing and Drawing
Before colour comes drawing. Hamilton advocates establishing the chief masses and perspective with a light, economical hand, reserving detail until the structure is secure. He encourages measuring proportions, mapping the main silhouettes, and designing the pattern of lights and darks as a foundation. The student is taught to simplify forms, tree masses into dominant shapes, hills into planes graded by tone, and to rely on large statements to prevent petty detail from dissipating the effect.

Colour, Tone, and Light
The heart of the book lies in its treatment of tonal relations and the key of a picture. Local colour is to be subordinated to the prevailing light; harmony arises from a restricted scale organized around a dominant warmth or coolness. Hamilton explains atmospheric perspective by the cooling and graying of distant forms, and he shows how gradated washes create aerial recession. He insists that shadows be luminous, the paper’s brilliance preserved, and that the painter decide early the highest light and the deepest accent so that every subsequent mixture falls into place.

Techniques and Procedures
Technique is presented as a sequence: secure the sky first with broad, unbroken washes; carry the distance while the paper is receptive; proceed to middle distance; reserve the foreground for decisive accents. Hamilton describes flat and gradated washes, wet-into-wet for clouds and far hills, glazing to deepen shadows without deadening, and dry brush to suggest texture on bark, rock, or grass. Lifting, scraping, and sponging are allowed as corrective or sparkling devices, but only when handled with restraint. He prefers reserving whites by foresight rather than relying on body colour, though he allows touches of opaque paint for highlights when necessity dictates.

Subjects: Sky, Trees, Water, and Distance
The book devotes focused attention to recurring landscape problems. Skies are treated as the key-bearers of mood; cloud forms must be constructed with knowledge of their structure and movement, not dabbed at random. Trees are built from trunk and main boughs outward, with masses related in tone before foliage is broken into edges and accents. Water is read as a pattern of reflections and planes, its value always a degree lower than the sky it reflects; ripples and currents are indicated by controlled edges rather than fussy strokes. Architecture, roads, and figures are addressed as scale-givers and compositional pivots demanding accurate perspective and sparing emphasis.

Study, Practice, and Style
Hamilton advocates steady outdoor study supplemented by studio correction. Quick pencil notes and small colour sketches train decision-making; repeated studies at different hours teach the changing key of light. He cautions against overworking, muddy mixtures, timid darks, and spotty touches, urging instead a habit of testing washes, mixing on the palette rather than on the paper, and committing to large, confident passages. Style, he suggests, emerges from consistent attention to nature and mastery of the craft’s simple means.

Place in its Era
Situated at the turn of the century, the book codifies the Victorian water-colour tradition for a new generation. Its emphasis on permanence, tonal design, and disciplined method reflects the best studio practices of the day, while its insistence on direct observation anticipates a more modern frankness in outdoor painting. The result is a practical, durable primer that makes landscape water-colour intelligible and achievable without sacrificing poetry.