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

Like others of his generation who had commenced their careers working for the book and periodical illustration trade, Birket Foster tended to shift towards painting, principally in watercolour but also on occasions in oil, in its own right. In 1860 he was pleased to be able to announce his graduation from the ranks of the illustrators to that of full-flown artist, and one whose works were in demand: ‘I have given notice to all my friends that I have given up all drawing on wood. It is a bold step but commissions for pictures pour in – and it is far more delightful working in colour’ (quoted Victorian Landscape Watercolors, exhibition catalogue, Yale Center for British Art, 1992, p.111). Some of his early subjects were re-workings in colour of views that he had previously treated as illustrations (although when the Dalziel Brothers offered £3,000 for a set of watercolour versions of all thirty plates from Pictures of English Landscape he refused (see Ibid., p.116).) Critics continued to detect traces of his formative training as an illustrator in the elaborate technique of the watercolours that he came to regard as his staple production. The texture of his stippled surfaces was seen to derive from the method of indentation of the wood block that would achieve varieties of density of surface in the printed image, derided by one as a style of ‘pointillé mannerism’, while his ‘stippled skies’ were described elsewhere as having ‘as many lines or threads as a piece of lace or a cambric handkerchief’ (each quoted, Ibid., p.153). The present watercolour The Swing beautifully exemplifies the stipple technique used by Foster.