Myles Birket Foster RWS (1825 – 1899)
“Oestrich on the Rhine”
Watercolour Vignette
Signed with monogram indistinctly
4” x 5” (101mm x 127mm)
Mount opening 5 1/8” x 6 ¾” (130mm x 170mm)
Overall framed size 12 ¾” x 14 3/8” (324mm x 365mm)
Provenance: The British Galleries, 7
Haymarket, London. Their label to reverse
Framed fitted with ultra-violet filtering low
reflect glass
In original Victorian frame and mount IMAGE 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, National Gallery Scotland,
Laing Art Gallery Newcastle, Newport Art Gallery and Paisley Art Gallery.
