Myles Birket Foster, R.W.S. 1825-1899

Myles Birket Foster was one of the most distinctive and original of all Victorian painters of landscape and genre subjects. In his representation of the countryside, he encompassed many facets of the rural existence – often showing figures, usually children, participating in the different activities, both working and festive, that were brought by the unceasing march of the seasons. As James Dafforne wrote of these representations of the countryside, ‘the rustic figures that give additional life to the landscape are just of that order which chimes in with all our associations of the country; children gathering primroses, or making bouquets of wild-flowers, catching minnows in the brook, romping in hay-fields, nutting, & etc; in fact, engaged in all the amusements and recreations indigenous to rural and sea-side life … It is impossible to look at any one of his works without a satisfying conviction that he is not only a diligent student of the peculiarities and varied beauties of English landscape, but an ardent lover of everything which appertains to it’ (‘British Artists: Their Style and Character, No.XCIX – Birket Foster, Art Journal, 1871, pp.157-9). His vision of an unchanging and peaceful England, undefiled by urban squalor or poverty, or the menace of industrialization – was an exercise in nostalgia rather than intended as a documentary account of the realities of everyday life. In addition, Birket Foster painted architectural and city views, as well as pure landscapes. Furthermore, he made frequent continental tours, on the first occasion in 1852 when he travelled along the Rhine, and later in 1868 to Venice, in company with William Quiller Orchardson and Fred Walker.

Birket Foster seems to have been particularly interested in the various festive holidays which marked the cycle of the seasons, and which offered country people a break from the hard routines of working life. May Day celebrations, which in past centuries had been of great importance, and which feature in the medieval romances associated with for example Robin Hood, were marked by the raising of a Maypole painted with spiral stripes and decked with flowers as well as the crowning of a May Queen, and which may have had its distant origins as a festival in the Roman Floralia.

In the course of the Nineteenth Century these events had generally been reduced to a more low-key event featuring games and processions for children. Although there seems to be no evidence that the May Day holiday was actively suppressed, it was presumably regarded as an inconvenient disruption to working schedules at a busy time in the agricultural and horticultural calendar (see The Victorian Countryside, edited by G.E. Mingay, two volumes, London, 1981, II, p.608). John Ruskin, among others, regretted the loss of the spring celebrations associated with May Day, and was instrumental in persuading Whitelands Training College for Women Teachers – then based in Chelsea – to reintroduce May Day processions and crowning ceremonies. Something of a revival in May Day ceremonies occurred in the late century, and in 1889 May Day was adopted as the official holiday of the international labour movement.

The children shown in Birket Foster’s delightful watercolour carry wreathes and garlands of flowers, with which they will presumably bedeck the maypole and crown their May Queen.