Myles Birket Foster

Foster was born on 4 February 1825 in North Shields, Northumberland, the son of a Quaker businessman who shared his name. He was schooled at a preparatory school in Tottenham and then at the Quaker Academy in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, where he received early drawing lessons from Charles Parry. At sixteen he was apprenticed, from 1841 to 1846, to the wood engraver Ebenezer Landells, and he also worked as a draughtsman under the publisher Henry Vizetelly before setting up as an independent illustrator in 1846, contributing rural imagery to publications including the Illustrated London News.

From the late 1850s Foster turned increasingly to watercolour. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1859 and continued to show there through 1881. He was elected Associate of the Old Watercolour Society in 1860 and a full Member of what became the Royal Watercolour Society in 1862, eventually contributing some 400 drawings to its exhibitions.

Foster died at Weybridge, Surrey, on 27 March 1899, and was buried on 1 April at Witley. His son, the hymnologist and composer Myles Birket Foster (1851 to 1922), carries the same name but is a separate, later figure.

Foster's reputation peaked in his own lifetime. His Times obituary in 1899 called him "certainly the most popular water-colour artist of our time." His work is now read as a benchmark of the detailed, sentimental Victorian vision of the English rural idyll, built on the same command of fine, engraving-trained detail that made his book and periodical illustrations so popular with a mass audience. Institutional holdings at the Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum treat him primarily as a defining historical figure of the genre rather than as a subject of ongoing critical reassessment.

No comprehensive, verified all-time auction record for Foster could be confirmed from available public sources as of this writing. Documented recent sales place typical prices for his work in the low thousands: Heritage Auctions recorded a USD 2,000 sale of a watercolour on 27 May 2010. A notably higher benchmark exists from decades after his death: Christie's London sold his painting The Meet for 900 guineas on 3 March 1930, as the leading lot in a 115-work dispersal of a private collection, a price Christie's own catalogue describes as exceptional for a work of art at the time. That figure reflects a 1930 sale rather than a current-market record, and no confirmed modern hammer price could be established for Foster from the sources reviewed. His work is actively handled today by Chris Beetles Gallery in London, a specialist dealer in Victorian art.

No catalogue raisonne exists for Foster, and no confirmed all-time auction record could be established from available public sources, so collectors should treat any single price point as illustrative rather than definitive. His enormous output, some 400 watercolours shown at the Royal Watercolour Society alone plus decades of book and periodical illustration, means supply is comparatively large relative to many Victorian contemporaries, which tends to keep individual prices moderate outside of exceptional works. Because his engraved and reproduced imagery was widely copied and issued as prints and chromolithographs "after" Foster, buyers should confirm whether a piece is an original watercolour or drawing rather than a later reproduction, and should search under both the Birket and Birkett spellings when researching provenance.