Brushed With Light

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a series of inventions — the Conté pencil, "wove paper," and hard-cake watercolor paints — resulted in the rapid spread of a revolutionary art form, which we call watercolor. The portability of the medium promoted plein air painting, while the use and superimposition of colored washes fed artists' fascination with atmospheric effects rendered subtly and with optical precision. The medium at once dared artists to take risks, yet demanded of them a control without which simple mistakes could corrupt hours of intensive work, unlike painting in oils in the studio, where such mistakes could be reversed. The watercolor revolution marks a great moment in Western art. While the early innovations took place in England and France, and great British watercolorists — Turner, Girtin, Blake — tower over the first half of the 19th century, the medium took off at the time American art began. With their love of landscape, Americans created a body of watercolor that stands as one of our nation's proudest artistic triumphs.

"Brushed with Light," at the Brooklyn Museum, surveys American watercolor from between the 1770s and the 1950s in more than 80 works drawn from the museum's magnificent collection. Watercolors' delicate nature forecloses all but their occasional exhibition, a source of profound frustration for the medium's fans. The Brooklyn Museum's last major exhibition culled from its collection was in 1998. The current show focuses on landscapes. One hopes we'll not have to wait nine years for the next major show of non-landscape subjects. That said, watercolor and landscape were made for each other. And your heart will begin to race the second you walk into the gallery. "Brushed with Light" exhibits several of the greatest watercolors ever made, including works by Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and William Trost Richards, and curator Teresa Carbone shows the masterpieces alongside other works that offer splendid surprises and rewards.

Ms. Carbone neatly sets up our expectations in the entry vestibule where John William Hill's "West Nyack, New York," an 1868 work by a John Ruskin admirer who intricately renders a flowered foreground in pale colors and vivid light, is displayed. Nearby, John Marin's 1917 "Pine Tree," though abstract, uses color to achieve a feeling strikingly like that of the Hill painting. These works bookend the watercolor "golden age." On the opposite wall, Homer's "Homosassa River," (1904) shows the artist in the full maturity of his powers. Has any artist ever shown green vegetation's absorption of light on an overcast day with the perfection and power shown here?

Of the show's eight Homers, none matches "Homosassa River," though every one holds great interest. Homer achieved his artistic maturity around 1885, and "Brushed with Light" includes his "Northeaster" from 1883, which is close enough to Homer at his best. The work depicts the backs of two people gazing pensively to a billowy sea rendered with a gradation of colors from snow-white through blues and greens to an ominous charcoal gray. The painter Kenyon Cox wrote of "the enshrouding mystery of air that is charged with moisture, the poetry of fog and mist" in Homer's art, here amply evidenced. His earlier watercolors may have an illustrational quality that the later works lack, but they still display beautiful feats of rendering air, as in the breeze that blows the dress and ribbon of the pretty shepherdess in "Fresh Air" (1878).

As early works by William Pierie (1777), William Guy Wall (circa 1820), and the gifted Currier & Ives illustrator Fanny Palmer (1850s), show, fine watercoloring took place in America before the Civil War. But as the British dominated the century's first half, Americans dominated the second. One of the show's surprises is Charles Henry Miller's "The Way the City Is Built" (1877), as urban-gritty as any Ashcan painting, showing a Harlem hill-leveling, with an old house precariously perched atop the hill, beside an already redeveloped street complete with new apartment building. I've never seen such a picture from the period of Manhattan's topographical denuding as searing as Marville's photographs of Paris under reconstruction from around the same time.

Another surprise is Thomas Moran's picture of the lagoon and Administration Building at the 1893 world's fair in Chicago. Moran, a great painter of the natural landscape, here brings brush heart-stoppingly to bear on classical fairgrounds, showing white buildings and the water in lowering light flared with crimson. Viewers also will find George Grosz's "Across the Lake" (1939) a surprise, as it erupts in purplish pustules like those on the diseased face of a Weimar sybarite. Eakins's "Whistling for Plover" (1874) is one of that artist's greatest watercolors, and William Trost Richards's "Calm before a Storm" similarly ranks in that superb artist's canon. The several works by Richards and the several by Homer make the show a survey of masters.

But even without them the show would be a must. I've had gripes about the Brooklyn Museum in recent years, but shows such as the recent one of Asher Durand and "Brushed With Light" compel me to return again and again.

Until January 13 (200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, 718-638-5000).