The theme of this catalogue, produced to accompany the eponymous exhibition in the Trade Fair Palace, is nineteenth-century watercolour art. This artistic technique, on the boundary between drawing and painting, is characterised by its lightness, bravura, and virtuosity. Given the contents of the National Gallery in Prague's collection, the exhibition, and consequently the catalogue, focus on Central Europe - both on Vienna, which was a major centre of watercolour art, and on Bohemia, where the local art scene responded to the stimuli from abroad with its own high-quality artworks. The book is organised to match the way the exhibition is structured, based on the key role that watercolours played in nineteenth-century culture. Particular attention is focused on the phenomenon of watercolour sketches, which, because of how they were freely conceived, served as a bridge between the art of the nineteenth century and modern art.