English artist Edward Francis Burney's Road in the Forest. Photo / Yale Center for British Art, Yale University Art Gallery collection (gift of Abel Cary Thomas, B.A. 1905)
In the 18th century, watercolours became a popular way for professional and amateur artists alike to document the landscapes, animals and plants that were important to them. Portable and aesthetically pleasing, watercolours helped bring painters' worlds to life.
Today, these works are precious and unwitting documents of a world altered
by the ravages of climate change, overhunting, urbanisation and other human activity. The Watercolour World, financed by the London-based Marandi Foundation, is a free online database of watercolours painted before 1900.
It's the brainchild of Fred Hohler, a former British diplomat devoted to art preservation. His last project, the Public Catalogue Foundation, a charity that is also called Art UK, catalogued all of Britain's publicly owned oil paintings.
This project brings together tens of thousands of art online. The nonprofit organization works with collectors around the world to find and digitise watercolours. It also is on the hunt for other pre-1900 watercolours that document animals, places, plants or events. So far, it has collected about 80,000 images.
The point isn't just to preserve them - it's to provide their documentary power to researchers.
