WILLIAM GILBERT FOSTER RBA 1855 – 1906
Gilbert Foster was born in Manchester, the son of a portrait painter from Birkenhead.
Gilbert moved to Leeds with his parents while still a child and was subsequently educated at the Grammar school there before training in his father’s studio. He became an art
master at Leeds Grammar School and was appointed Undermaster at Leeds School of Art. He also taught pupils in his own studio, including Owen Bowen, whom he also taught in the formal school situation.
Although living in Leeds at 4 Winstanley Terrace, Headingley, in 1890 he bought a
cottage in Runswick. One can envisage him as the hub of an ever-increasing group of
artists and students who visited the area. He not only gave them advice and
encouragement, but also helped them to find patrons from the wealthy industrial towns and cities of Yorkshire. Perhaps because he was older than most of the Staithes Group artists and from a different generation of painters, Foster painted for many years in the archetypal Victorian manner: striving to copy what he saw in front of him rather than searching for the essence of his subject and producing work embodying what I term as ‘soul’.
In direct contrast with most of the Group, I believe that his best work was painted towards the end of his career. This later work is still an accurate depiction of the scene in front of him, but it is no longer hard-edged and detached. Light and atmosphere become more
important as he captures sunlight and shadow or a sea fret drifting onto the coastline.
Figures are more likely to be at work than posing prettily in a cottage garden.
Although never a member of the Staithes Art Club, William Gilbert Foster deserves to be given a place of honour in the Group itself as defined as a colony of artists who lived and painted in and around the Parish of Hinderwell from the early 1880s until the First World War. He was pivotal in drawing artists to the area and encouraging them in their work.
He first exhibited at a major London Gallery in 1876 at the age of twenty-one. He
continued to exhibit regularly at both the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of British artists where he was elected a member in 1893. He also exhibited at the Royal Society of Artists, Birmingham, the Walker Gallery, Liverpool, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and the Yorkshire Union of Artists of which he was an elected Council Member and Vice President. He has work hanging in public collections in Bradford, Huddersfield, Hull, Manchester and Whitby. Yorkshire Union of Artists.
Bibliography:
Staithes Group Centenary Exhibition, Rosamund Jordan 2003
The Staithes Group, Peter Phillips, Phillips and Sons, Marlow1993
The Yorkshire Union of Artists 1888 – 1922, Dennis Child, Leeds Philosophical and
Literary Society Ltd, Leeds 2001
The Dictionary of British Artists 1880 – 1940, J. Johnson & A. Greutzner, Antique
Collectors’ Club, Woodbridge 1976
© Rosamund Jordan 2003 (Please contact me before quoting from the above information publically, and credit myself and this website)
