Biographical and Critical Sources: “Art Annual,” 1890; “Athenæum,” April 1, 1899; “D. N. B.” (Supplement); “Birket Foster,” by H. M. Cundall, 1906.
Reproductions: “Art Annual,” 1890; Cundall’s “Birket Foster.”]
In his choice of subjects Birket Foster confined himself generally to roadside and woodland scenes, and in these he sought prettiness rather than the deeper and more profoundly poetical emotions. His work is neat and extraordinarily accomplished, but his style being always the same made its many merits seem mechanical and unfeeling. Unlike the older men he avoided the use of broad washes of transparent colour, used body-colour freely, and finished his work with elaborate stipplings.
His standard of excessive finish, his general methods of work and choice of subject-matter, were violently opposed to those of the younger men who came after him. For this reason, and also because of the great popularity he enjoyed, Birket Foster’s work has excited the animosity of “superior persons” and æsthetes. But their cheap and easy sneers merely mark the inevitable reaction which follows a period of indiscriminating praise. Doubtless Birket Foster was not the great artist his contemporaries thought him to be. But his work must figure in any well-balanced history of British landscape painting, if only because it expresses so fully and abundantly, and with so much technical success, the artistic ideals of a large part of the nineteenth century. But it also deserves consideration for other reasons. Birket Foster’s grace and prettiness were the results of his sincere and unaffected love of the orderliness and real beauty of the life of the English countryside. He had a genuine affection for the themes he painted, and he painted them in the way he thought best. Fashions in technical matters change, slowly perhaps but inevitably, and I shall be very much surprised if the future will not be readier than we are to-day to give Birket Foster’s work its due meed of affectionate admiration.
ALFRED WILLIAM HUNT
[Born in Bold Street, Liverpool, Nov. 15, 1830; educated at Liverpool Collegiate School and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, which he entered with a scholarship, 1848; a fellow of Corpus, 1853-1861; Associate of Liverpool Academy, 1854, member, 1856; Associate Society of Painters in Water-Colours, 1862, member, 1864; died May 3, 1896.
Exhibited: Royal Academy, 1854, ’56, ’57, ’59-’62, ’70-’75, ’77, ’79-’83, ’85-’88; Society of Painters in Water-Colours, 1860-’93; Society of British Artists, 1846, ’59, ’60, ’70, ’73, ’74; Grosvenor Gallery, 1882, ’87; New Gallery, 1888, ’90; Portland Gallery, 1854-’56, ’60; Dudley Gallery (Oil), 1872.
Works in Public Galleries: National Gallery; V. and A. Museum (Water-Colours); Liverpool, Glasgow, and Birmingham Art Galleries.
Biographical and Critical Sources: “Athenæum,” May 9, 1896; Catalogue B. F. A. Club’s Exhibition, 1897; “D. N. B.” (Supplement); “One Way of Art,” by Violet Hunt, “St. George’s Review,” June 1908.
Reproductions: One in “The Old Water-Colour Society” (The Studio Spring Number, 1905).]