Highland Scene near Dalmally, Scotland

Details

MYLES BIRKET FOSTER, R.W.S. (NORTH SHIELDS 1825-1899 WEYBRIDGE)
Highland Scene near Dalmally, Scotland
signed with monogram (lower left) and further signed, inscribed and numbered 'N^o 1 / Highland Scene near / Dalmally. / Birket Foster / The Hill / Witley / Surrey' (on a label on the backboard)
pencil and watercolour heightened with touches of bodycolour, with scratching out on paper watermarked 'WHATMAN MILL KENT 1882'
30 7⁄8 x 43 1⁄8 in. (78.4 x 109.6 cm.)

Provenance

John H. Foster (†); Christie's, London, 24 March 1906, lot 29 (550 gns to Lefevre).
with L. H. Lefevre Gallery, London.
Charles Cheers Wakefield, 1st Viscount Wakefield (1859-1941); Christie's, London, 18 June 1909, lot 88 (550 gns to Lefevre).
with L. H. Lefevre Gallery, London.
Colonel Sir William Thomlinson (1854-1943) (†); Christie's, London, 17 September 1943, lot 11 (680 gns to the Fine Art Society).
Anonymous sale; Christie's, London, 13 March 1959, lot 83 (450 gns to O. L. Gow [?])
with Peter Nahum, London, Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelites and their Century, 1989, no. 39.

Literature

H. M. Cundall, Birket Foster R.W.S., London, 1906, p. 137 and 205.
I. Spielmann, Souvenir of the Fine Arts Section, Franco-British Exhibition 1908, London, 1908, p. 170, ill. opposite p. 171.
F. Lewis, Birket Foster, Leigh-on-Sea, 1973, p. 36.
J. Reynolds, Myles Birket Foster, London, 1984, p. 197.
A. Wilton & A. Lyles, The Great Age of British Watercolours 1750-1880, London, 1993, p. 304, pl. 316.

Exhibited

London, The Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours, Winter Exhibition, 1885-86, no. 88.
Probably Dublin, Herbert Park, The Irish International Exhibition, May-November 1907 (catalogue untraced).
London, The Art Palace, Franco-British Exhibition, May-October 1908, no. 465 (lent by Sheriff [Charles] Wakefield).
London, Royal Academy of Arts and Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, The Great Age of British Watercolours, January-April and May-July 1993, no. 132.

Conditions of sale

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Lot Essay

Birket Foster is most associated with genre and rural scenes of Surrey, but he also had a particular interest in Scottish landscape, showing Scottish watercolours at the The Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours in almost every year of his thirty-nine years as an exhibitor there.

When visiting Scotland, he stayed at a specially converted cottage at Pittlochry, near the Grampian mountains, where he worked on watercolours commissioned from him by dealers, most notably Arthur Tooth & Sons, London. Dalmally is located in Argyll and Bute, very near Loch Awe in the south west Highlands.

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