Myles Birket FOSTER. R.W.S.
(1825 – 1899)
“Outside the Village Inn”
Watercolour. 12
cm x 10.5cm. Signed with monogram IMAGE
Myles Birket Foster was born in North Shields in 1825. He was a painter, chiefly in watercolour, of
landscape and rustic scenes in Surrey and elsewhere, peopled with children and milkmaids. The course of his early career may have been
influenced by his parents’ knowledge of Bewick. When the family moved to London in 1830, he was given a Quaker education and apprenticed
to the wood-engraver Peter Landells. Until the mid 1800s he worked exclusively as
an engraver and a black and white illustrator, at first cutting blocks and then
producing drawings of topical scenes and current events for Punch and the Illustrated London News. He
was then employed as a draughtsman under Henry Vizetelly
and illustrated Longfellow’s Evangeline
and Roger’s Italy. In 1846 he set up on his own, illustrating books and
producing illustrations for the Illustrated
London News. Throughout the 1850s
he was teaching himself to paint in watercolour and he turned to it seriously
in about 1859. Thereafter he exhibited some
four hundred works with the Old Watercolour Society, of which he was elected
Associate and Member in 1860 and 1862.
He also exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1859 – 1881. His
house at Witley, Surrey was
partly decorated by the Pre-Raphaelites and became a centre for artists of many
different types. He lived there until
illness forced a move to Weybridge in 1893.
He travelled widely on the Continent from his
first visit to the Rhine in 1852, and he first visited Venice with Fred Walker in 1868.
He was commissioned to make a series of fifty Venetian views by
Charles Seeley of Nottingham at a fee of £5,000.
His early experience as a wood-engraver left its mark in his style. In finished watercolours he employed a
stipple technique, especially on flesh, and his drawing were always minutely
accurate. He generally worked on a comparatively
small scale, but he is also one of the very few watercolourists
to have made a complete success of really large composition.
Hardie notes: “As a painter, he worked with
meticulous finish and with astounding technical skill. At his best he showed a fine sense of composition
and command of colour.
Under all the rather sugary surface of sentiment and prettiness lies a
hard core of sound and honest craftsmanship.” Manuscripts relating to this
artist are held at the Victoria and Albert Museum and examples of work by Myles
Birket Foster are in the British Museum, the Victoria
and Albert Museum, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Haworth Art Gallery Accrington,
Blackburn Art Gallery, Grundy Art Gallery Blackpool, Exeter Museum, Glasgow Art
Gallery, Greenwich, Hitchin Museum, Inverness Library, City Art Gallery
Manchester, Neational Gallery Scotland, Laing Art Gallery Newcastle, Newport Art Gallery and
Paisley Art Gallery.
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