Myles Birket Foster - The Swing

signed with monogram l.r.

watercolour over pencil
10 3/4 by 16 in.
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Of all Birket Foster's subjects the most charming are those which depict pastoral scenes of children and young women, involved in outdoor activities such as picking flowers and berries, paddling in streams or playing in the fields as in the present picture. These rustic idylls are the epitome of Englishness in which the glory of the seasons are celebrated in the jolly dispositions of the exuberant little children, dressed in a way which is perfectly in keeping with the picturesque qualities of his woodland and pastoral scenes. The skies are always blue, the riverbanks bejewelled with wild flowers and the children happy and decorous and there are never rain clouds threatening to ruin the perfection of the blue skies above. The idyllic charm of Birket Foster's watercolours of this type, was described by Marcus Huish as 'gentle art' and he continued to described the countryside as portrayed by Foster, 'we find his fields alive with nibbling flocks, his lanes with the slowly moving wain, his streams with the solid angler, and his woods with Horace's pensive muser... although he sometimes paints the rushing torrent... he much prefers the infant stream and - "Willows grey close crowding o'er the brook" (Marcus B. Huish, Birket Foster; His Life and Work, The Art Annual, 1890, p.19)

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.