Myles Birket Foster

Myles Birket Foster (4 February 1825 – 27 March 1899) was a British illustrator, watercolourist and engraver in the Victorian period. His name is also to be found as Myles Birkett Foster.

Life and work

Foster was born in North Shields, England of a primarily Quaker family, but his family moved south to London in 1830, where his father founded M. B. Foster & sons — a successful beer-bottling company. He was schooled at Hitchin, Hertfordshire and on leaving initially went into his father's business. However, noticing his talent for art, his father secured an apprenticeship with the wood-engraver, Ebenezer Landells, and exhibited some 400 of his paintings at the Royal Academy over more than 2 decades. Birket Foster travelled widely, painting the countryside around Scotland, the Rhine Valley, the Swiss lakes and in Italy, especially Venice. In 1863 he moved to Witley, near Godalming in Surrey where he had an elaborate Tudor-style house ("The Hill") built. Being friendly with Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, he had the house decorated and furnished in contemporary style, with tiles and paintings by Burne-Jones and Morris' firm, Morris and Company. The same year he published a volume of "English Landscapes," with text by Tom Taylor.

Although he had painted great numbers of landscape scenes from Scotland to the Mediterranean, it was after moving to Witley that Birket Foster produced the works for which he is best known—a sentimentalised view of the contemporary English countryside, particularly in the west Surrey area. Although criticised for their idealised view of rural life, they were recognised for their detail and execution. Birket Foster's work (along with that of other artists) was used by Cadburys, the chocolate manufacturer, on the cover of their chocolate boxes from the 1860s onwards. Printed in 1861, The Carewes: a tale of the Civil Wars was the swashbuckling royalist family history of a gentry on the edge of Windsor Forest, illustrated with fine images and a dashing flourish; it was much appreciated in America. "the dainty water-colour drawings executed...appeal to the majority of the British public more than the works of any other." So wrote H.M. Cundall in 1906 in the preface to a first biography.

He became ill in 1893 and moved to Weybridge. He continued painting, but died on 27 March 1899. His obituary in The Times referred to him as "certainly the most popular water-colour artist of our time". He is buried at All Saints' Church in Witley.

Friends and family As well as Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, his artist friends and associates included Fred Walker, Charles Keene and William Quiller Orchardson.

In 1864, he married Frances, the daughter of Dawson Watson, and sister of the artist John Dawson Watson. Their eldest son, also called Myles Birket Foster (29 November 1851–18 December 1922), was an organist, composer and writer on music who studied at the Royal College of Music with Sullivan, Prout and Frederick Westlake. He was organist and choirmaster in Marylebone and at the Foundling Hospital Chapel among other places, and music director at the publisher Boosey & Hawkes. He composed symphonies, overtures, children's cantatas, a string quartet, trios and church music, and wrote a History of the Philharmonic Society (1913). Birket Foster resided at 14 Woodstock Road, Acton.