Beschreibung:

MYLES BIRKET FOSTER RWS (1825-1899) SPRING ON A SURREY COMMON Signed with monogram, also bears inscription on an old label attached to the backboard: `Purchased at Christie's/ from the Grant Morris/ Collection, April 98/ Birket Foster, Drawing/ "Spring"/ A Surrey Common, with sheep/ - Children at a spring/ size 18 x 29in/ Exhibited at the Water Colour/ Societie's [sic] Exhibition 1874`, watercolour and bodycolour with pencil 45 x 70cm. Provenance:J. Grant Morris, London, Christies, April 23rd 1898, (bt. Agnews 78gns); with Arthur Tooth, London; London, Christie's, January 11th 1946, (bt. de Casseres 560gns); with H & P de Casseres, London, 1946; Private Collection, Somerset Exhibited: London, Royal Watercolour Society, Summer, 1874, no.75 as `Spring`. Birket Foster's early training under the wood engraver Ebenezer Landells (1808-1860) at the age of sixteen instilled in him the meticulous skill and exacting draughtsmanship required to produce fine illustrations for Punch, The Illustrated London News and other publications. He established his own business in illustration by the time he was 21 but did not start to show his works at the Old Water-Colour Society until 1859. He went on to show over 400 works there and was elected a member in 1862. From a large and comfortable house called The Hill at Witley in Surrey (decorated by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones , Birket Foster concentrated upon idyllic scenes of rural life using a painstaking feathery, stippled technique to soften and blend the hard lines that he has perfected under Landells' tuition. His style, so loaded with wistful nostalgia to our eyes but strongly contemporary for Victorian collectors, was to become hugely popular. Martin Long's chromolithographs of Foster's works were intended to broadcast the artist's subjects to a wider public but were so skilfully produced that an anecdote tells of the artist himself entering a shop to enquire about the price of one of his own drawings that was, in fact, just such a print. The children in Birket Foster's pictures were rarely depicted idle but always seem happy in their labours, despite the intensive work required to run and feed a rural home during the worsening agricultural depression of the 1870's. The Factory Act of 1833 had exempted children only from labour in factories but they were still expected to work hard in the rural environment. W. Cooke Taylor wrote in Factories and the Factory System (1844) that "there are no tasks imposed on young persons in factories that are anything near so laborious as hand-weeding corn, hay-making, stone-picking, potato-picking or bean-chopping." Here, the more pleasurable pursuits of tending sheep bestow an atmosphere of quiet satisfaction upon the scene and Birket Foster's knack for capturing happy contentment is fully apparent. Birket Foster later charged a guinea to authenticate his own work and myriad fakes are still commonly found today. They are sometimes quite accomplished but are more routinely guilty of imitating a Birket Foster composition without capturing the detail or the understated richness of colour. However, when Birket Foster excelled himself and managed to retain his precision across a large sheet of paper such as this, his skills are both impressive and instantly distinctive.