The Hayfield by Myles Birket Foster Print Picture 7.625" x 5.625"

Description: The Hayfield by Myles Birket Foster Print A colour print, from a disbound book of rural life prints, with unrelated text on the reverse. Suitable for framing, the image size is approx 7.625" x 5.625" or 19 cm x 14 cm edge to edge. Page size including border approx 9.5" x 7.375". This is a vintage print not a modern copy and can show signs of age or previous use commensurate with the age of the print. Please view any scans as they form part of the description. All pictures will be sent bagged and in a board backed envelope for protection in transit. While every care is taken to ensure my scans or photos accurately represent the item offered for sale, due to differences in monitors and internet pages my pictures may not be an exact match in brightness or contrast to the actual item. Text taken from the opposite page. Please note this cannot be supplied with the print. Any spelling errors are due to the OCR program used. MYLES BIRKET FOSTER 1825-1899 Myles Birket Foster was a book illustrator and watercolour artist who enjoyed a great deal of success in his own lifetime. His reputation has grown steadily over the years, even though many may now find much of his work rather sentimental. Like a number of his contemporaries, he too was guilty of depicting a highly romanticised picture of rural England where well-scrubbed milkmaids, rosy-checked children and happy harvesters lived and worked in a forever sunny Eden - a setting far removed from the brutish realities of the Victorian farm labourer's life. Like most watercolour artists, Birket Foster often used washes, but achieved his best effects by working with a fine brush, as dry as possible, finishing off most of his paintings with the stippling method. Although he tended to idealise his subjects, Birket Foster never used a professional model, dolled-up in some semi- appropriate 'costume'. His farm workers and children are the genuine article, wearing the clothes they put on to go out into the fields. The Hayfield is a typical Birket Foster subject, showing his rural figures relaxing on a summer's afternoon rather than hard at work in the fields. As with all his work his style is immediately recognisable. His superb craftsmanship and command of colour are equally in evidence in his watercolour, Children Herding Sheep Through a Gate, shown on the front cover. The figures of the man carrying kindling and the two little girls swinging on the gate, who give way to a long vista of field after field, are all meticulously executed. As well as being a watercolour artist, he was also a talented wood engraver, etcher and painter in oils. The legacy he has left us is an important one as it embodies all that was best in the realm of Victorian watercolours. Birket Foster was born in North Shields on 4 February 1825, the seventh child of a Quaker family, who claimed that he could draw before he could speak. Starting off his professional career by working for a well-known wood engraver named Ebenezer Landells, his very first work appeared in an issue of Punch dated 5 September 1844. In the following year, the Illustrated London News was first published, a magazine for which he produced a large body of work covering a wide range of subjects. In 1859, he turned at last to watercolour painting, and within three years had become a regular exhibitor at the Royal Watercolour Society and the Royal Academy. Leaving London in 1861, he settled in Witley, Surrey. He died in Weybridge, Surrey in 1899.

Price: 3.49 GBP

Location: Dereham

End Time: 2025-01-28T15:51:56.000Z

Shipping Cost: 19.62 GBP