Joseph Southall

Joseph Edward Southall RWS NEAC RBSA (23 August 1861 – 6 November 1944) was an English painter associated with the Arts and Crafts movement.

A leading figure in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century revival of painting in tempera, Southall was the leader of the Birmingham Group of Artist-Craftsmen—one of the last outposts of Romanticism in the visual arts, and an important link between the later Pre-Raphaelites and the turn of the century Slade Symbolists.

A lifelong Quaker, Southall was an active socialist and pacifist, initially as a radical member of the Liberal Party and later of the Independent Labour Party.

Southall was elected an Associate of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (RBSA) in 1898 and Member in 1902. He became President of the Society in 1939 and stayed in this post until his death in 1944.

Biography

Early life Joseph Southall was born to a Quaker family in Nottingham in 1861. His father, a pharmacist, died a little over a year later, and the young Southall and his mother moved to Edgbaston, Birmingham to live with his mother's family.

After an education at Quaker schools including Ackworth School and Bootham School in York, Southall returned to Birmingham in 1878 and was articled as a trainee with the leading local architects' practice Martin & Chamberlain, while studying painting part-time at the Birmingham School of Art. Both institutions were steeped in the spirit of John Ruskin and the Arts and Crafts movement: architect John Henry Chamberlain was a founder and trustee of the Guild of St George, while the Principal of the School of Art, Edward R. Taylor, was a pioneer of Arts and Crafts education and a friend of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.

Southall however was frustrated by his architectural training, feeling that an architect should have a broader understanding of craft disciplines such as painting and carving. With this in mind he undertook several tours in Europe. In 1882 he visited Bayeux, Rouen and Amiens in Northern France. The following year, having left Martin & Chamberlain, he spent thirteen weeks in Italy, visiting Pisa, Florence, Siena, Orvieto, Rome, Bologna, Padua, Venice and Milan.

Italy was to have a profound impact. The frescoes of Benozzo Gozzoli were to inspire a deep admiration for the painters of the Italian Renaissance who - before the practice of oil painting spread to Italy from Northern Europe in the sixteenth century - worked largely in egg-based tempera. Forty years later Southall recalled:

Quote|the thrill of joy which I experienced when, without any knowledge of what I was about to see, I stepped inside the enchanting cloisters of the great Campo Santo of Pisa. There I found myself at 21 years of age face to face with a vast series of frescoes, so quiet and yet so gay, so reticent in manner and so lively in essence that words must ever fail to convey even the faintest expression of what I felt. On his return to Birmingham Southall conducted his first experiments in tempera painting at the School of Art.

Hiatus Initially, however, Southall's discovery of Italian tempera painting had less effect than his studies of Italian architecture. Southall's uncle George Baker - a friend of John Ruskin and Master of Ruskin's Guild of St George - passed some of Southall's Italian sketches on to Ruskin himself, who remarked that "he had never seen architecture better drawn".

Edwardian heyday

The years before the outbreak of World War I saw Southall at the height of his achievement and fame. He worked on a series of large tempera paintings on mythological subjects that were widely exhibited across Europe and the United States. These could take up to two years to complete but were to establish his reputation critically.

Southall's entry in the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists members' register; in his own hand. Dated 1902, with an initialled postage stamp.

He was elected an Associate of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists in 1898 and a full Member in 1902, In 1907, he was prominent in the first exhibition dedicated to the work of the Birmingham Group held at the Fine Art Society in London, and in 1910 he was the subject of a one-man exhibition at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris, which was both a critical and a commercial triumph.

Although Southall also painted in a variety of other laborious media (such as the watercolour on vellum of his work Hortus Inclusus), lack of patronage limited his work in fresco - the medium he personally found most interesting. His best known fresco Corporation Street Birmingham in March 1914 - painted for Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery - was described by William Rothenstein as "perhaps the most perfect painted in the last three centuries".

With the renewed interest in Victorian art this began to be seen as a misrepresentation. John Russell Taylor, art critic of The Times, described him in 1980 as "a natural-born surrealist"; writing that "there is undoubtedly an authentic strangeness in the way he saw things, which comes out most powerfully in his tempera paintings of contemporary life, but also casts a weird light over many of his watercolours ... we are much more likely to find ourselves thinking of Magritte and Balthus and Chirico than of anyone nearer to this apparently stick-in-the-mud Arts-and-Craftsman." Pablo Picasso is recorded by Osbert Sitwell as being so impressed by a Southall painting when visiting Violet Gordon-Woodhouse in the 1920s that he tried to buy it on the spot for his private collection.

Far from being isolated from developments on the continent, Southall's reputation was if anything higher in France than in England, with exhibitions at the Salon de Champs-Élysées and the Salon de Champs-de-Mars from the 1890s onwards, and membership of the Union Internationale des Beaux-Arts et des Lettres in 1910 and the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1925. His most successful exhibition was that at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris - one of the main centres of progressive French art.

Political activism Southall's interest in radical politics may have been awakened by his uncle George Baker, whose family had a history of radicalism going back to the seventeenth century. Southall's 1885 sketch of John Bright addressing a Birmingham political meeting might be taken as an early indication of radical interest.

Southall politics were strongly influenced by the pacifism of his Quaker faith. His opposition to the tide of jingoism that surrounded the Jameson Raid in 1895 provoked him into political action, and the outbreak of World War I in 1914 caused him to switch his allegiance from the Liberal Party to the anti-war Independent Labour Party, for whose Birmingham branch he served as secretary from 1914 until 1931.

Southall's obituary in the Birmingham Post recorded that he was always "an enthusiastic supporter of that Socialism or Communism which William Morris expressed in his News from Nowhere".