1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Foster, Myles Birket

FOSTER, MYLES BIRKET (1825–1899), English painter, was born at North Shields. At the age of sixteen he entered the workshop of Ebenezer Landells, a wood engraver, with whom he worked for six years as an illustrative draughtsman, devoting himself mainly to landscape. During the succeeding fifteen years he became famous as a prolific and accomplished illustrator, but about 1861 abandoned illustration for painting, and gained wide popularity by his pictures, chiefly in water colours, of landscapes and rustic subjects, with figures, mainly of children. He was elected in 1860 associate and in 1862 full member of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours. His work is memorable for its delicacy and minute finish, and for its daintiness and pleasantness of sentiment.

See Birket Foster, his Life and Work (extra number of the Art Journal) by Marcus B. Huish (1890), an interesting sketch; and Birket Foster, R.W.S., by H. M. Cundall (London, 1906), a very complete and fully illustrated biography.