William Walcot's Architectural Art

William Walcot, RA Perspective of County Hall under construction. c.1920.

William Walcot (1874-1943) was an architect, etcher, and watercolorist with a taste for monumental, classical forms.

He was born in Russia but grew up in Western Europe and South Africa. He received his training in Saint Petersburg and Paris, where he gravitated to Art Nouveau in his architectural work. 

His architectural fantasies have an epic feeling, like something from a Cecil B. Demille movie.

His compositions are founded on an accurate perspective structure, with loosely applied touches of paint that define small details in one area and melt away to indistinctness in another.

The masses of light and dark tone are unified into large shapes, creating a sense of monumentality, mood, and scale.

The book The Great Perspectivists describes Walcot's watercolor technique in this way: the watercolor "is richly and impressionistically applied over the underlying geometry of the drawing: a free technique which brought out the building's monumentality and the contrast of solid and void, and which may have owed something to the architectural etchings of Frank Brangwyn."

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William Walcot on Wikipedia