Powerscourt Waterfall

Elizabeth Murray · August 1843

Medium

Watercolor and white gouache over graphite on gray wove paper

Original size

25.4 × 17.6 cm (10 × 6 15/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Romanticism

Painted in the summer of 1843, Elizabeth Murray's *Powerscourt Waterfall* captures the drama of Ireland's tallest cascade with a delicacy that feels almost at odds with the subject's raw power. Murray was a British watercolorist who traveled widely through Europe and the Mediterranean, earning a reputation for landscapes that balanced topographical precision with atmospheric sensitivity. Here, working on gray wove paper with watercolor and white gouache, she uses the mid-toned ground itself as a structural element — the paper's cool undertone breathes through the shadows of the surrounding woodland, giving the composition a unified, silvery light that purely white paper could not achieve. The gouache highlights, applied with restraint, pull the eye upward through the falling water. The Powerscourt estate in County Wicklow was among the most celebrated picturesque destinations in nineteenth-century Ireland, drawing artists and tourists who were drawn equally by the grandeur of the demesne and the wildness of its waterfall setting. This hand-painted oil reproduction translates Murray's quiet mastery into a medium built to last — the layered pigments and warm tonal depth of oil on canvas honoring the original's sense of light and place without mimicking it slavishly.