Myles Birket Foster

Myles Birket Foster (1825-1899), painter, was born at North Shields, Northumberland, on 4 February 1825, and educated at a preparatory school in Tottenham and at the Quaker Academy at Hitchin, Hertfordshire. He was apprenticed to the wood-engraver Ebenezer Landells, 1841-1846, and thereafter worked as an illustrator, producing illustrations for editions by poets and prose writers. From 1858 he concentrated on painting, working largely in watercolour and on studies of roadside and woodland scenery. He died at Weybridge on 27 March 1899.

From the guide to the Myles Birket Foster: Letters to Robert Dudley, 1873-1898, (Cambridge University Library, Department of Manuscripts and University Archives)