MYLES BIRKET FOSTER, RWS (1825 - 1899)
As a result of his meticulously realised idylls of rural life and landscape,
Myles Birket Foster must surely be considered the quintessential Victorian watercolourist.
He was born at Tynemouth, Northumberland on 4 February 1825 and, though he lived
in London from the age of five, would become particularly popular with collectors
in his native North East. He was educated at Quaker schools in Tottenham and
Hitchin, and for a short and unsatisfactory period worked in the family brewing
business. Fortunately, he was able to convince his parents to allow him to pursue
a career in art. He was apprenticed as a wood-engraver, and spent some time
under the Northumbrian Ebenezer Landells, the one-time pupil of Thomas Bewick.
His first commissions included a beautiful series of initial letters produced
for Punch (1841-43). From 1846 Birket Foster worked independently as a black
and white illustrator. He began a ten year relationship with the Illustrated
London News in 1847, and made his name three years later with vignettes for
Longfellow’s Evangeline. Throughout the eighteen-fifties he consolidated
his skills on such projects as Gray’s Elegy (1853) and Cowper’s
The Task (1855), and at the end of the decade worked with his friend, the printer
Edmund Evans on colour-printed illustrations. This collaboration developed from
Birket Foster’s experiments in watercolour. During the same decade he
had evolved a flexible stippled technique which enabled him to become one of
the few artists to successfully transfer the medium of watercolour to large
surfaces, and he looked for means of reproducing his subtleties. He produced
landscapes and rustic scenes in the Home Counties and, from the eighteen-fifties,
painted regularly on the Continent, in France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland
and Italy. In 1860 he was able to build an elaborate Tudor-style home, known
as The Hill, in Witley, near Godalming, Surrey, and there assembled an impressive
collection of British art. By 1860 he was exhibiting regularly at the Old Water-Colour
Society and was elected an associate member. He became a full member two years
later, and from that time worked less regularly as a book illustrator. (The
society was renamed the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1881).
He exhibited oils at the Royal Academy from 1869 and as late as 1895 was elected
to the membership of the Berlin Academy. In 1893 illness forced him to sell
his house and most of his collection and move to a smaller house in Weybridge,
Surrey, where he continued to paint until his death on 27 March 1899.
Related links
Exhibition: The Chris Beetles Summer Show 2007
