Extracción de las características

As with other contemporaries such as Lewis, Palmer, North and Burne-Jones, Birket Foster created a distinctive style based on the use of the controversial new nineteenth-century pigment, Chinese White. His use of white deserves more detailed comment.

Foster’s early training in the field of drawing in black-and-white for wood engraving, first at Ebenezer Landell’s establishment in London from 1841 to 1846, and then for Henry Vizetelly and the Dalziel brothers, encouraged in him a love of tiny strokes of the pen or brush and an eye for intricate and contrasting tonal details of rustling foliage, rough straw thatch, weathered stone, grasses and rustic gates. Everything was seen in microscopic detail and translated into a miniature mosaic of colour and texture,

using the engraver’s methods of hatching, cross-hatching and stippling. Foster’s grandson, Lancelot Glasson, himself a painter, was sure of the connection:

Considering that he had been producing black and white drawings for the engraver for nearly twenty years, it is not surprising that his earlier water-colours are strongly influenced in technique by his previous work. To one who had been drawing, most minutely, in pen and ink for the engraver, the use of washes would not come naturally; and so we find the earlier water-colours laid in with a wash and then built up with a system of small strokes and hatching.³⁵

Earlier in the century, drawing for wood engraving involved covering the wood block first with a ‘preliminary coat of “whiting” chalk or brick-dust: this would give it a

“tooth” that would more readily take a pencil mark when the silvery “ghost” of the transfer lines were worked up.’³⁶ It is generally thought that Foster used a priming of the new nineteenth-century Chinese White rather than ‘whiting’, with details drawn in Indian ink and pencil, although we have no hard evidence from his letters or the Roberson archive to confirm this.³⁷ A surviving design by Foster on nine boxwood blocks, dating from 1852, shows a thin layer of white on the wood, over which trees have been outlined in grey paint, with pencil cross-hatching on the church and the gravestones, and highlights on the gravestones picked out in thicker white (Figure 98).

When Foster began to paint in watercolour in the late 1850s he began to adopt a similar technique, working ‘in colour over the smooth and brilliant surface given by Chinese White laid upon paper,’ in much the same manner as William Henry Hunt, Lewis and Palmer, whose paintings were later to adorn his walls at Witley.³⁸ Foster’s close friendship with Frederick Walker between 1868 and 1875 would also expose him to a watercolour technique involving considerable use of Chinese White, specifically aimed at improving an unsatisfactory paper surface.³⁹ Firm evidence of Foster’s adoption of Chinese White exists in the pigment list published in The Magazine of Art.⁴⁰

Whilst it is difficult to prove that Foster painted onto a continuous priming of white, the remarkable luminosity of some of his early watercolours makes such practice seem a possibility. Often a rather cold enamelled effect is produced. In 1862 the critic from the Athenaeum found his work had a ‘hard, cold finish’, depicting ‘nature, hard, bright, clear…not a little like porcelain.’⁴¹ A Cottage near Witley, Surrey (Figure 99) has just such an appearance. Whether or not Chinese White priming was used, it is clear from close observation of the work that the brilliantly detailed finish is the result of at least a generous use of thick bodycolour mixed with each of the pigments. A word of caution must unfortunately be expressed at this point, however. Birket Foster’s work has been

extensively forged over the years, to the extent that even in his lifetime, he was forced to start charging people who brought him works to authenticate.⁴² Even he had difficulty at times distinguishing between his own work and copies. The watercolour above was withdrawn from the sale at which it was advertised, and whilst there may be a genuine reason for this, it may also mean that it was identified as a fake.⁴³ More will be discussed below about this subject.

It is clear from the four fascinating sketchbooks in the Victoria and Albert Museum, that often on cream paper Foster used white to highlight areas of his pencil and ink sketches (Figure 100) and as a corrective measure (Figure 101) and that this method would be carried on when working up his watercolours (Figure 102). The V&A sketchbooks were previously not dated, but one (P5-1922), which Foster gave to his patron, Sharpley Bainbridge, I have dated to around 1876, as it contains a sketch which was worked up into a watercolour and exhibited at the SPWC that summer as A Donkey that Would Not Go (Figures 103 and 104). In finished paintings, often an initial coating of white was employed on small areas such as the faces of his figures, which were to be afterwards intricately stippled and hatched with tiny strokes of pure colour. Foster also applied details of thick white pigment on top of washes of other colours, as can be seen in the detail of his large work The Harrow, where the white of the girl’s basket has flaked off to reveal the green of her skirt underneath and the white headscarf of the little girl on the right has also begun to lift off (Figure 105), probably because the paint was applied ‘with his brush as dry as it could be’. He appeared to be

‘drawing to a peculiar degree, not washing with a brush.’⁴⁴

The Harrow is typical of Foster’s early work, which is achieved by the use of a great deal of stippling and hatching in every part of the picture, particularly on the faces and hands of the children and on the trees and grasses. John Ruskin had admired William Henry Hunt’s fine stippling, hatching and bodycolour techniques, advocating them in his watercolour manual, The Elements of Drawing. Application of tiny dry brushstrokes would ensure that the individual pigments retained their intensity, blending visually rather than on the paper, ‘using atoms of colour in juxtaposition’⁴⁵ (Figure 106). Yet whilst Ruskin strongly advocated the use of stippling and cross-hatching in small still-life watercolours, he could tolerate them far less in landscape and in figure painting, and he criticised Foster’s use of them, complaining of his

‘mistaking, in many instances, mere spotty execution for finish’ and regretting that ‘he has never taken the high position that was open to him as an illustrator of rustic life.’⁴⁶

On another occasion he complained that ‘A photograph…would far excel the charm of this painting; for in it, good and clever as it is, there is nothing supernatural, and much that is subnatural.’⁴⁷ Other critics observed, however, how Foster’s ‘microscopic minuteness’ had ‘taken the public by storm.’⁴⁸

Foster certainly mixed white with many of his pigments to create strong opaque pastel colours with plenty of body. Reynolds comments that ‘his early skies were so thickly worked with body colour that the effect is almost as of impasto, showing the raised lines of the brush strokes.’⁴⁹ The Athenaeum in 1867 complained of the ‘rather chalky manner of the artist’, although the previous year they had found his River Scene, Evening ‘nearly free of chalkiness’.⁵⁰ Attitudes amongst the critics to the growing use of bodycolour at this time were often highly critical, and this will be discussed in Chapter Eight. In his later watercolours Foster appears to use less bodycolour and, together with a warmer colour palette, the effect created in these is much softer.