The paintings of two watercolour masters from the collections of two national galleries will be brought together in the display In the Haze: watercolours by Turner and Williamson at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, 12 June to 30 August 2004. The display features paintings by JMW Turner from the collection of Tate Britain, which have not been displayed together in north west England in over a century. Alongside them will be watercolours by Daniel Alexander Williamson from the Walker's collection, which are very rarely publicly displayed due to their delicate nature. These paintings have just been shown at Tate Britain to accompany their major landscape exhibition Pre-Raphaelite Vision: Truth to Nature. The Lady Lever Art Gallery is the only other gallery that will be showing this display. Williamson was a landscape painter active in northern England in the second half of the 19th century. He was born in Liverpool in 1823 and was associated with the local group of Pre-Raphaelite artists who exhibited at the Liverpool Academy. After settling in north Lancashire in 1861 he became known for his landscape paintings of the countryside between from the Lake District to the Pennines. In his later career, Williamson's art was increasingly influenced by the works of Turner, possibly as a result of visiting exhibitions of part of the Turner Bequest in Liverpool and Manchester in the early 1880s. Visitors to the display will be able compare and contrast how the two artists handled various subjects and techniques to see exactly how far this influence extended. Far from being outshone by the better-known artist's works, Williamson's paintings complement Turner's beautifully.

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