Original subtitles

The world's most spectacular landscapes

have always inspired painters.

And over three centuries, British artists travelled the globe

in search of the most thrilling perspectives.

They chose not to paint in oils, but in watercolours.

I'll be following in the footsteps of Britain's most famous artist,

JMW Turner.

But I'm also on the trail of some amateur painters,

who recorded their travels.

The art of watercolours is the perfect medium

for capturing the beauty of the world.

As well as its dangers and tragedies.

Watercolours can have the reputation of being cosy and wishy-washy

but I want to take you back to a time

when they were on the cutting edge, the photography of the day

and painters risked life and limb to capture an exciting image.

At home in London I have a small collection of watercolours

that are extremely precious to me.

This, I think, is St Paul's

with a rather misty, clever effect at the back.

Now here are a couple of boat scenes.

The reason I like these pictures is that they were done by my father.

And they hung in various houses and pubs where he worked

and that's why presumably the frames are a bit tattered.

I love the fact that he's signed it.

EC Hancock, Enrico Cameron Hancock. SHE LAUGHS

This is particularly interesting, it's...

an exotic scene somewhere in Morocco or something like that, or maybe he copied it from a postcard.

But the thing that comes out of this is that I realised

that watercolours could take you, to all sorts of different places.

And also the other nice thing is that, an amateur like my father

could come up with something really rather presentable.

The story of the British love affair with watercolours

began 250 years ago

with a bold young artist called John Robert Cousins.

Like many painters of his generation,

he'd grown up painting classic British views.

But he was hungry to find new subjects to make his name.

So in the 1770s, Cousins waved "Goodbye to England"

to travel to the continent.

He wanted to go to places that no artist had ever been to before.

And oils weren't good for his purpose because they're heavy and awkward to use and very expensive.

So the medium he chose because it was portable and very cheap was watercolours.

This was Cousins' destination -

a small town, nestling amongst the Alps.

Today Chamonix attracts thousands of visitors from all over the world.

But when Cousins first arrived in the Alps,

towns like this were far from the tourist trail.

Nobody wanted to come to The Alps.

All the guidebooks described it as

a "dreadful place full of unmitigated horror."

The mountains were, "areas of dread, full of wolves and bandits."

And some people even said they saw dragons.

But Cousins wasn't to be deterred.

He was determined to climb the Alps to get the most dramatic views.

And in those days there was just one means of transport.

Donkeys were the only way of ascending the Alps

but there were terrifying stories of their little legs getting stuck in the snow and them being frightened

of the height and throwing their riders off.

I hope that's not going to happen. "Come on, come on, up the Alps!"

Oh, dear oh, dear poor little thing.

And Cousins' mountaineering was to pay off.

Inspired by the wild terrain of the Alps, he created sublime pictures.

The willowy texture of Cousins' watercolours

perfectly captured the light and landscape of the mountains.

And the tradition of artists climbing the Alps to paint watercolours lives on today.

This is Michel Delemar, a former ski instructor, and now a full-time artist.

Nice to meet you, Sheila, Michel.

Can I sit next you? Yeah sure.

You're obviously drawn, if not obsessed with this area.

What, why, why particularly does it draw you?

I fall in love with the mountains a long, long time ago.

When I was young. Mmm.

My wife, she is from here.

So I fall in love with my wife, and the place, you know, both.

Do you think watercolours are particularly suited to this landscape?

Rather than oil?

Yeah, I think so, because the thing in the mountains, the light is unbelievable.

And with watercolour you can have a translucent, you know, very light colours.

And especially the shade in the mountain like you see are very dark.

When you paint your shade suddenly you see your painting coming through, you know, and very light.

And it suggests an element of

terror, awe. Yes.

Would you say that? Of course.

I think specially, from the past because, the mountaineers in the 18th century

was so afraid by all this, this piece of ice, you know, it's like monster, you know and they are...

They'd never been on, they don't know what can happen if they reach a peak or what.

But even now, even now. you know. now when I go skiing on a glacier, for me, a glacier is like a monster.

You see a big, big deep and dark crevasse you know, it's scary, you know?

Cousins didn't just paint the grandeur of the mountains of Europe.

He was also attracted to the magical quality of water,

capturing the continent's most dramatic lakes and rivers.

This was one of his favourite locations.

Lake Geneva.

Cousins' watercolours taught us to appreciate the drama in nature.

Up until then, artists had tried to tame nature, to clean it up, to cut out all the jagged edges.

But it wasn't just the Alps that he taught us to look at.

People began to think about visiting the wildernesses in Britain as well.

British water-colourists began to paint pictures of the Scottish Highlands and the Lake District.

This was an age of Romanticism

celebrating the beauty of nature,

with water-colourists leading the way.

But Cousins paid a heavy price for his ever more ambitious expeditions.

Exhausted and in ill health, he returned to Britain.

But his work was rejected by the Royal Academy,

"the gateway to artistic success."

His watercolours were judged "not proper art."

A doctor diagnosed him as suffering a decay of the nervous system.

Today, we'd call it a breakdown.

At the age of 42, he was committed to the lunatic asylum, Bedlam.

There is a final bittersweet twist to Cousins' story.

The doctor that looked after him in Bedlam,

happened to be an art collector and recognising Cousins' brilliance, he bought up his pictures.

And he used to hold get-togethers of up-and-coming young artists and he

would sit them down and suggest that they copied Cousins' work.

Thus it was that a future generation of water-colourists were inspired by a man languishing in an asylum.

But artists who wanted to emulate Cousins' adventures had their hopes dashed.

By the turn of the 19th century, Europe had become a battleground...

..as the Napoleonic Wars tore the continent apart.

The landscapes captured by Cousins were now no-go areas.

So British water-colourists were stuck at home.

One frustrated artist who pored over Cousins' paintings would become famous.

His name, Joseph Mallord William Turner.

Turner is now regarded as the greatest painter these islands have ever produced.

But the young artist had all the cards stacked against him.

Far from being born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Turner was a poverty-stricken Londoner.

His father was a barber and his mother died in a lunatic asylum,

but this background was the making of him.

He was an outsider and a rebel

and he didn't give a damn about the snobbery towards watercolours.

Deep in the vaults of Tate Britain, Christine Curpielle

is going to show me some of Turner's rarely seen British watercolours.

So this is a group of works that Turner painted in 1805,

when he was on a prolonged trip and stay on the Thames.

This is probably near Wallingford because we think that's Wallingford Church.

Oh, my goodness, I was evacuated there during the war!

Gosh! Unbelievable! Little did I know.

That's amazing.

And you can even see Turner's fingerprint in the paint here,

where he's physically moved the paint around.

That would be using all sorts of means to draw out moisture, to move pigment around.

That is wonderful, isn't it? And that's an actual fingerprint.

I learnt to swim there, but he didn't know that.

Now that is amazing!

This is in contrast to the lighter palette.

He's using darker colours.

And apparently the weather in the summer that year was very capricious

and there was sunlight followed by storms and so he was able to observe all this.

He's got the light coming over. It's been a bit of a storm and the light is coming out.

That is wonderful. Where is this?

This is near Isleworth.

Even more remarkable than the watercolours

is the Tate's collection of Turner's sketchbooks.

Well, the sketchbook is called the Skies Sketchbook,

and it's about 1818.

These are all different sky formations, right?

Absolutely. Clouds and formations.

Yes. And this would have been just him doodling away and practising or whatever?

Exactly. Cos he wasn't going to sell it or anything?

He didn't know we were all going to think his sketchbook was all wonderful. Exactly.

Oh, look at that!

Look at that!

That is lovely.

And what's this? This writing?

This is Turner's writing.

He didn't keep a diary or a journal but he did make notes throughout his sketchbook.

Sometimes of expenses, of itineraries

but here we have a list of clothing that was needed on the task.

Three coats... Yes.

four waistcoats, five breeches, four underknickers, does that say?

Under...no..

Under waistcoat? It looks like under...no, under waistcoats.

Eight cravats. Yes, yes.

My goodness, he must have been weighed down with luggage, apart from anything else.

Pocket-handkerchiefs, boots, shoes, coloured waistcoat, shirts.

That is extraordinary.

Well, bless his heart, he must have looked very smart.

He was a gentleman traveller. Ah! But he wasn't, he was a little London Cockney, wasn't he?

But it was to earn respect and clothing being a passport to patronage. Well, he didn't need it.

He has our respect now, doesn't he?

When Britain had defeated Napoleon and peace was at last restored

Turner seized his chance to travel.

And in 1819,

he set out for the city that would allow his genius to blossom.

To me, Venice is the most beautiful, sensuous city I have ever visited.

A place of romantic getaways and picture postcard views.

But this was not the place Turner discovered when he first arrived.

Venice was at its lowest ebb,

devastated by war and pestilence.

I'm trying to imagine that in Turner's time, these grand palazzi

would have been wrecked, looted, full of starving Venetians.

And the waterway would have been choked with rubbish and raw sewage.

Disease was rife, cholera, things like that, it was an impossible place to live.

But somehow the fact that the city was so fragile, so near to ruin

fired his imagination more.

Turner painted a city that looked as though it was dissolving before your very eyes.

The Venetian waters and the subtlety of Turner's brush strokes

created mirage-like wonders.

Travelling to Venice in those days wasn't easy, it wasn't a quick flight,

it could take weeks and Turner on his last visit was quite an elderly man.

On top of that, his Italian was always jumbled up with French in a Cockney accent.

So nobody understood a single word he said

but despite all this, he managed to do hundreds of paintings

of every aspect of Venice.

To find Turner's favourite locations I'm going to need a guide

and who better than Francesco Dumosto,

whose family has lived in Venice for centuries.

Welcome to Venice. Thank you very much. So you're going to be my guide is that right?

Yeah, I will be your guide with my boat.

I hope we are not going to sink.

But before we go, I want to show you a thing.

You see that palace with the scaffolding? Yeah.

Was the Locanda of Leon Bianco where Turner was living in. At that time it was a hotel.

The best hotel in Venice, but before it was built by my family.

Really? Yeah, but we lost it in the 17th century.

You're going to be very interesting, Francesco.

Oh, no you're too kind.

Yeah, I'm interesting but without a penny because when we lost the

house, in every generation there is someone that has to work.

Yeah. And in my generation it's my brother.

So me and you we enjoy with the boat. Let's go.

I see. Right how do we get into it?

I take the boat there, don't worry.

Oh, my God!

OK great. Can't I follow in a gondola?

It's OK now. The smoke goes behind.

Does it? Yeah, don't worry.

Have you got anything to go honk-honk if we bump into anything?

Do you have a hooter? What is a hooter?

Something that you can signal.

You know, I forgot it.

Like in a car. They know how to whisper.

Oh, good. Whistle, whistle.

Whistle, sorry. There is a boat coming straight towards us.

Yeah, but he will see me!

HORN HONKS

Francesco is taking me far from the canals and the tourist trail.

The water is less predictable out here

and it inspired the wilder, stormier side of Turner's art.

Our destination is the Island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni.

It's the perfect vantage point

for looking at Turner's favourite view of the city,

across the Venetian Lagoon.

I think that at the beginning Turner came to the lagoon

to be more immersed in the nature,

to feel more part of the nature

and to detach like from the human community, to find more himself.

Turner seemed to have painted

a fragile city, a disappearing city, do you think?

Yeah. It's quite interesting how he could think about the fragility of the city, but it's a fragility that

is coming back again for us.

We have big ships entering.

We have thousands of people, millions every year, going around

the town and it's a same fragility that is in another way

but we still have it and in a certain way is like

a woman to which we have to take care. If not, it will disappear.

Do you think whereas he was looking at the ruin after the war,

we're looking at it thinking it also may be destroyed again?

I mean, we may be looking at it from your boat underneath us one day.

There is people that thinks like that.

That we'll be underwater park one day. Really?

A myth that will stay in our memory.

But I think that the myth that it will stay for ever like Atlantis, I hope won't happen.

Today, Turner's visions of Venice

are seen as the greatest watercolours ever painted.

But his dazzling landscapes were viewed very differently in his own lifetime.

Turner's paintings of Venice horrified the art establishment.

They accused him of deformities, of throwing paint at the canvas,

Some even accused him of being insane,

which must have come particularly hard for somebody whose mother died in Bedlam.

What so annoyed the critics

is the impressionistic style Turner had invented.

Newspapers even turned him into a national figure of fun.

A contemporary cartoon

showed the artist using a mop instead of a paintbrush.

But Turner's wild techniques still inspire painters today.

Venetian artist Nicola Tenderini is going to show me

how Turner created this painting of San Giorgio Maggiore.

I put on the water, in all the paper so.

You're soaking the paper with water. Yes. Yeah.

Now, depends the weather but I take the colour

from blue. Right.

And I put... an expanded and I spread on paper.

Why yellow? Now I do the, do the... I don't see yellow.

Yellow is on the line of horizon, no?

Oh, I see, out there.

What I love about his pictures is he doesn't seem to obey any rules and yet in doing them

he seemed to just throw technique to the winds and do what he felt like.

Is that right? Yes, yes, is er...

Sometimes for the details he used the nails so.

To cut into the colour?

Yes, so.

Also the saliva so.

Because he couldn't be bothered to dip his finger in the water

he would actually spit at it?

Or was there a superior thing about spit as opposed to water.

Yeah. Nicola, that's really lovely. It's like a late Turner.

Thank you, Sheila. Thank you very much.

Can I buy it? Why not?

All right. How much?

As you want it... We'll talk afterwards when they've gone.

With all the spitting and scratching I suppose it's no wonder

Turner's contemporaries thought he was a bit eccentric.

But thankfully for Turner he had a champion,

the most important art critic of the time, John Ruskin.

Ruskin argued that Turner's venetian images were

so ground-breaking and original

that the artist should be ranked alongside Michelangelo and Leonardo.

And such was Ruskin's influence that Turner's paintings became fashionable and sought after.

Ruskin described Turner's watercolours of Venice as the most

perfectly beautiful pieces of colour ever done by human hands.

And he didn't just defend Turner's watercolours, he argued that artists

should used the medium if they were to have any hope of reproducing the splendours of Venice.

It was as though a city built on shimmering water

could only really be captured by an art made out of water.

And Venice was to become THE place for British artists to ply their trade.

While Turner had revelled in the decay of the city

the artists that followed him turned Venice into a grand theatre set,

with the Venetians all scrubbed up to look like attractive extras.

These luxurious paintings

became a kind of advertising campaign for the city.

From the middle of the 19th century, Venice was to prosper again all because of one thing,

the tourism inspired by these paintings.

And many of these Victorian travellers didn't just want to

visit Venice, part of the experience was to record their own impressions of the city in watercolours.

Many of them had one of these little boxes.

This is a Victorian watercolour box, absolutely perfect.

Everything you need to do watercolours.

There are the beautiful colours, which of course you could mix and there are the palettes to mix it.

Totally portable, no fuss no palaver.

15 million of these were manufactured in the 19th century.

Every town and village in the British Isles had a watercolour society.

It was the beginning of the age of the amateur.

One would-be artist who joined in the fashion for watercolours was Queen Victoria.

Her favourite pastime was to ride out

armed with brushes and watercolours to capture her favourite views.

She painted the rugged landscapes of Scotland,

the gentle sweep of the Isle of Wight,

and even her own children on holiday.

And because of Victoria, the art of watercolours

would become an essential part of any young lady's education.

Victoria's reign saw Britain colonise the world with the Queen as Mother of Empire.

And her subjects were to bring their passion for watercolours to the most surprising places.

Some of the most exciting watercolours of the age were created in India.

India was the Jewel in the Crown of the British Empire.

And in the 19th century, Calcutta was the capital of British India,

the beating heart of imperial rule in the country.

The Empire relied on generals and administrators and businessmen that

would travel from Britain and maintain the colonies.

And behind those powerful men were the wives and sisters who

kept the imperial households going, and those women loved to paint.

They were intoxicated by the sights and sounds of their newly adopted country.

Women like Fanny Parks and Emily Eden

painted watercolour portraits of the people they encountered.

But I think the most remarkable water-colourist of the time

was the wife of the Governor General,

who arrived in 1856, Lady Charlotte Canning.

You can still savour Lady Canning's legacy in Calcutta today.

Ah thank you, two, two.

Right, do you like these?

Mmm. Do you want some?

What, what are these called?

Ledikeni. What?

Ledikeni. Ledikeni.

That is another word for "Lady Canning",

because this sweet was invented for her

because she had a very sweet tooth.

Let's have a go. Let's have a taste, shall we? Ohh, ohh what does it do?

Tasty, yeah?

Tasty. Do you like it?

You have some, you have some.

Thank goodness she was famous for other things besides these!

Go on, you have some. OK?

I'll hold it.

OK. You have it?

What do you think? It's good.

Do you? He likes it.

But Lady Canning's life in India was anything but sweet.

Her husband Lord Canning was notorious for being an adulterer.

For her it was not a happy marriage,

in spite of the luxurious surroundings.

This was their residence just outside Calcutta...

..but to Lady Charlotte it felt almost like a prison.

Charlotte wrote to her family that she found herself isolated "To a degree I cannot describe."

As wife of the Governor General, she had to keep herself aloof from the British population in Calcutta

and her husband wasn't much help.

He immersed himself in work so he had no time for her.

Perhaps she used painting as a way of preserving her sanity.

This is one of the first watercolours Lady Charlotte painted in India.

It's of the Cannings' sitting room.

I find something sad about it.

It feels more like a hotel than a real home.

But Lady Charlotte refused to wilt away

as India gave her the chance to grow as an artist.

Happy Diwali!

Tonight is Diwali, one of the biggest celebrations in India's religious calendar.

Lady Charlotte was intoxicated with the colour and energy of India.

Some of her fellow countrymen dismissed the Indians as heathens

but she said that she enjoyed seeing the country devoid of any European influence.

So Lady Charlotte left British Calcutta far behind.

She crisscrossed the country, in search of the perfect view.

By road or by river,

she would travel to the most remote regions of India.

But for the most impenetrable areas, she had to use the local transport.

Lady Canning didn't just travel by elephant,

but she also painted and sketched while she was on it.

She would make the elephants stand still while she painted a certain view or perspective.

Lady Charlotte's travels must have been arduous

but there was one sight above all she was determined to see.

Lady Canning was enchanted by the Taj Mahal.

She said it was more beautiful than she could have ever imagined.

And isn't it just?

It seems to be floating there.

Lady Canning made the most of her visit,

painting the Taj from every viewpoint.

She was as bewitched by it as the millions of people who flock here every year.

I think one of the reasons people like coming to the Taj Mahal is that it's a temple dedicated to love.

It was built by an Indian Emperor called Shah Jahan,

in memory of his beloved wife who died in childbirth.

It's an act of devotion made out of marble.

I do wonder what Lady Charlotte felt as she contemplated this

great celebration of the bond between man and wife.

Although she admired the beauty, it must have made her a little bit sad.

And the Taj Mahal still attracts watercolour artists today.

Malind Malik is a painter and teacher, who believes amateurs like

Lady Charlotte are every bit as good as the professionals.

Why do you think watercolours especially appeal to amateurs?

Probably amateurs have little less time on their hands

and they want to express whatever they want, their visual sensation.

So watercolour has a great spontaneity about it in terms of expressing yourself,

and amateurs is what I call is a painter who is not painting to display or exhibit. Or sell.

Just trying to express themselves.

Or sell, yeah.

Well, certainly with Lady Canning. hers seem to me spectacularly good.

Spectacularly good in the sense I would say they were her very personal statements.

She was trying to document her experience

and express her visual sensation through what she was painting.

That's the beauty of it.

And it's wonderful to have a record of what things looked like.

Yes, yes, yes. At that time.

It's her experience about the things that has been recorded.

So it's the human element in the catching that visual experience.

Lady Charlotte may have found some happiness in her painting

but her passion for travel was to prove her undoing.

This is a photograph of her aged just 44,

looking thin and haggard.

In 1861, a few months before she was due to go home to England,

Lady Charlotte set off on a sketching tour of Darjeeling.

And she went into jungles and forests and swamps,

the devoted artist looking for a perfect subject.

When she got home she complained to one of her friends of having a "dazzle of a headache."

She had contracted jungle fever, what we call malaria

and it proved to be fatal.

This is her tomb.

Apparently, her husband wept over it day and night,

realising too late how much he loved her.

His own little Taj Mahal.

One of the reasons that critics still dismiss watercolours

is amateurs like Lady Canning.

But she was utterly dedicated.

She showed that watercolours, being so portable and so easily applied,

could show an immediate human reaction in a way that oils can't.

The word amateur comes from the Latin meaning "to love"

and to my mind there's nothing wrong in doing something for love rather than money.

And I think that her paintings need to be more widely known.

As the 19th century progressed,

watercolours faced a threatening new rival.

Photography was novel and exciting.

And it seemed the thrill of precisely capturing a view or

portrait could never be matched by watercolours.

Amateur photography clubs replaced painting societies up and down the land.

By the beginning of the 20th century

the great age of watercolours appeared to be over.

But just as watercolours were being dismissed as yesterday's news

they were to have a heroic flourish, in the work of Paul Nash.

Nash was born a Londoner,

but he was to become the 20th century's most brilliant painter of the English countryside.

Nash believed that there was something magical,

almost mystical about the English landscape.

He said that the trees around here had personalities of their own, like human beings.

He said they were like wonderfully beautiful people.

And Nash's talent for painting landscape would be called upon in terrible circumstances.

The First World War.

Photography was outlawed in the trenches because of the fear of espionage.

So painters like Nash were sent to the front line

as official war artists to capture the conflict.

An artist like Nash had to operate under a regime of extreme censorship.

The military didn't want the public back home to see images of dead bodies.

So Nash came upon something even more haunting.

He didn't show the battle itself

but the scars that it left on the land.

Up until this point watercolours had captured the beauty of the land

but in the nightmare of war,

Nash's paintings showed its utter destruction.

Watercolours allowed Nash to capture the immediacy of industrialised

warfare, as he braved shellfire and the threat of mustard gas.

The scenes that Nash encountered were like frightful nightmares.

He said, "There was not a glimmer of God's hand to be seen anywhere."

He pledged himself to be a messenger,

to tell the truth about the war.

He said, "Feeble and inarticulate may be my message

"but it will have the bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls."

The watercolour tradition of depicting war scenes lives on.

Doug Farthing has been an acting soldier for 25 years,

serving in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Unlike most war artists, who are civilians,

his paintings show the reality of war from a soldier's perspective.

Explain to me exactly what the picture is.

It's showing soldiers. I'm standing on a helicopter landing zone.

What I try and portray in a painting like this is the isolation of it but also the camaraderie.

I feel the banter and laughter of these soldiers here. Really?

Yeah, they're really quite... Now, isn't that funny? Because I get a feeling of fear.

I feel there's a sort of feeling of "Oh, my God!".

Well, there is that there because when they get off on the other end

on the helicopter it's generally a hot drop zone.

That means a war zone? Yeah, yeah a war zone. They're going into a battle.

So tell me about this one.

That's a quick sketch.

Now this one was done in place and I used an ammunition crate.

I like to work on the materials around me.

We had a visit from General Petraeus and I just stood back and sketched the scene really quickly.

Have you done many pictures of the citizens, as I would call them?

Yeah, yeah. The civilians.

Yeah there's a few in here.

Oh, that's lovely.

That's two ladies, we were stood near a border crossing point in Iraq and two ladies

just wandered past me but it was sort of coming up to late night

and the light on the palm trees behind was really striking.

It was as if they were coming back from work or the market, it was quite nice.

Lovely. It's a lovely feeling of peace there, strangely enough.

Well, there is and the notes here are about peace in some way.

"Iraq ladies walk down track away from patrol.

"I phoned Julia tonight."

Is that your wife? Yes, it is yeah. Yeah.

"The girls sound happy. Louise is on her way to work.

"I miss them very much, I've been away now for four weeks, the longest for a long time."

I know four weeks doesn't sound long but I'd only just

rejoined the Army as a reserve soldier.

I'll do little annotations of soldiers patrolling through the villages.

And annotations of who were on the patrol at the time and who I was working with.

Wonderful.

Yeah, it's not just the imagery, it's the stories behind the imagery as well.

There can't be a better record of these operations than you're doing here.

Especially all the written stuff and the names of all the guys in it.

Yeah, yeah. Imagine if we had that sort of record of some past war.

Mmm. Or any past event. That kind of verbatim record is wonderful.

I do a lot of collage work with old diary bits about things that have gone bad.

And there is no way I could ever show it, really.

Really? Yeah, they're kind of pieces I'll show later in life.

Of the of the awful things that you saw? Yeah, the awful things.

Why do you feel you can't show them?

Because the people are still... the families? We're still here.

The families here I'm serving still, it's...you know, it's not...

it's just not the right thing to be doing at this stage.

Every time we lose a soldier,

it doesn't matter what regiment he's come from, it hits home

because he's got a family, he's got children at home. Of course it does.

He's got parents, he's got brothers, sisters you know, so they're very important.

15,000, 16,000, 17,000, 18,000,

19,000, 20,000.

Watercolours have so often been the product of great pain and struggle

but in the modern age they're worth serious money.

9,500...10,000...

They're still not quite as valuable as oil paintings but they're catching up fast.

Last year a painting by Cousins, Lake Albana,

sold for £2.4 million.

A record for any British watercolour from the 18th century.

920,000...950,000.

And even a small Turner watercolour can fetch a small fortune.

At £270,000, selling it then for 270,000.

Sold. Thank you.

But, for me, these pictures have a worth beyond any market price.

What I like most about watercolours is their ability to show emotion.

Nowadays we seem to look at everything through the protection of a lens.

We've got digital cameras, we've got phones with cameras, everything's so quick and superficial.

I think we should treasure watercolours

because they are anything but a throwaway image.

They take thought and effort

and they show us the value of taking our time

to observe the beauty and the pain of the world.

And art can have no higher ambition than that.