Joseph Southall The Blue Shed, Southwold, 1923

About the artist

JOSEPH EDWARD SOUTHALL  (1861 - 1944)

JOSEPH SOUTHALL was born in Nottingham in 1861. His father died in the year after his birth and at this point he moved with his mother to join her family in Birmingham. He was brought up as a Quaker and remained committed to Quaker values throughout his life. At the age of seventeen he became an articled clerk in an architectural practice but after four years he left this post in order to pursue a more unusual, self-directed artistic apprenticeship.

He attended classes at the Birmingham School of Art from 1882. In 1883 he spent thirteen weeks in Italy and, inspired by an observation in a book by John Ruskin, began to experiment with the favoured medium of the early Italian painters: egg tempera. Through an uncle he met Ruskin himself, who commissioned him to design a museum for the Guild of St George at Bewdley in 1885. Although the commission came to nothing, Ruskin did send Southall back to Italy on a research trip. Southall also befriended the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, visiting him in London on several occasions between 1893 and 1897, and Burne-Jones actively encouraged his experiments with tempera.

In June 1903 Southall married his first cousin, Anna Elizabeth 'Bessie' Barker and they spent their honeymoon in Southwold. For most of the 34 summers following their wedding, the Southalls returned to Southwold with an almost religious loyalty. These annual visits resulted, in the words of Ian Collins, 'in a comprehensive portrait of the Suffolk town . . . as it was transformed from a sedate Victorian watering hole into a modern seaside resort.'

Some of Southall's contemporaries proved blind to the extraordinary luminosity and richness of his vision. Roger Fry, for example described him as "a little slightly disgruntled and dyspeptic Quaker artist who does incredible tempera sham Quattrocentro modern sentimental things with a terrible kind of meticulous skill" A better known painter, however, took a different view. Ian Collins recounts how, in 1950, Sir Osbert Sitwell recalled a late 1920s visit by Picasso to Violet Gordon Woodhouse :

Fellow guests were astonished as he kept returning to a little room to admire pictures 'bought from an old gentleman' and eventually offered to buy them. They were a 'portrayal, in pure, bright, almost encaustic tones of paint, of sailing ships in full rig against a flat sea.' The artist was Joseph Edward Southall.

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See Ian Collins, Making Waves: Artists in Southwold, Black Dog Books, 2005. See also the fine entry on Southall in Wikipedia, the Southall gallery on the Victorian Web and the entry in fineart.ac.uk.