page_title: Art of Birmingham
section_title: The Midlands Enlightenment and the Birmingham School of landscape
hierarchical_section_title: Art of Birmingham / Painting, drawing and printmaking / The Midlands Enlightenment and the Birmingham School of landscape
caption_attribution_description: English: Distant view of Birmingham (1828) by Thomas Creswick, Oil on panel
context_page_description: Birmingham has a distinctive culture of art and design that emerged in the 1750s, driven by the historic importance of the applied arts to the city's manufacturing economy. While other early industrial towns such as Manchester and Bradford were based on the manufacture of bulk commodities such as cotton and wool, Birmingham's economy from the 18th century onwards was built on the production of finished manufactured goods for European luxury markets. The sale of these products was dependent on high-quality design, and this resulted in the early growth of an extensive infrastructure for the education of artists and designers and for exhibiting their works, and placed Birmingham at the heart of debate about the role of the visual arts in the emerging industrial society.
  The city's history in the fine arts also betrays this influence, with many of Birmingham's most notable artistic figures coming from a commercial or craft background.
context_section_description: Birmingham's tradition in applied arts such as jewellery and metalwork predates the industrial revolution, but organised activity in the fine arts of drawing, painting and printmaking began only with the town's huge growth in size and wealth in the 18th century, after the growing realisation of the importance of design skills to the town's manufacturers led to the establishment of several schools of drawing in the 1750s. The town's first known fine artists date from the period between the 1730s and the early 1760s, and were closely associated with prominent figures of the wider cultural awakening known as the Midlands Enlightenment. The first record of an artist working within Birmingham comes from the writer Samuel Johnson, who knew an Irish painter in Birmingham in the 1730s who taught him how to "live in a garret at eighteen pence a week". The portraitist Edward Alcock was living in Birmingham in 1759 and 1760 when he painted a portrait of the enlightenment poet and landscape gardener William Shenstone; and he still had strong links with the town in 1778, when he was commissioned to paint a portrait of Matthew Boulton and to draw pictures to be reproduced by polygraph in Boulton's factory.
  Particularly significant was Daniel Bond, whose career started as a painter and japanner in Boulton's Soho Manufactory, but who is recorded as exhibiting landscapes at the Society of Artists of Great Britain in London by 1761. He was to exhibit over forty works in London over following decades and it is with him that emerges the distinctive Birmingham School of landscape painting, whose influence was to last into the mid 19th century. Bond taught drawing and had a wide influence within the town – a pupil of his exhibited A Drawing of Landscape after Mr Bond of Birmingham at the Free Society of Artists in London as early as 1763. Among Bond's other pupils was Edward Barber, who also established himself as a drawing master within Birmingham, and whose elder brother Joseph Barber had established his own academy of drawing in Great Charles Street by 1780, which was continued after his death in 1811 by his son Vincent Barber. Among Joseph Barber's pupils was Samuel Lines, who established another academy in nearby Newhall Street in 1807. It is through these networks of teaching that the Birmingham tradition of landscape was developed and sustained, with notable later figures including Thomas Baker and Thomas Creswick – a pupil of both Lines and Barber, who was to become a notable Royal Academician in the 1850s and 1860s.
  The landscape artists of the Birmingham School were distinguished primarily by their shared technique, being noted for portraying natural features such as trees with an emphasis on character rather than on precision, often adopting the techniques used in other disciplines such as portraiture to present "a quest for the essential, the quiddity of what is observed". The tradition of artists from Birmingham travelling to North Wales to seek the rugged rural scenes that formed the accepted idea of picturesque landscape was established by the 1790s and would continue into the 19th century, but early Birmingham School artists were also exploring the tension between picturesque rusticity and novelty, sophistication and the artificial by the late 18th century, and by the 1820s were examining how the traditional language of landscape art could be applied to the rapidly industrialising Birmingham area, through emphasising or exaggerating the rural characteristics of Birmingham's hinterland, presenting the town as a feature within a wider picturesque natural landscape, or depicting the tension between the area's rural and urban features.
  By far the most significant figure of the Birmingham School, however – the most important Birmingham artist of the early-to-mid-19th century and the first to have an international influence – was the landscape painter David Cox. Born in Deritend in 1783, Cox studied under Joseph Barber in Birmingham and under Cornelius Varley in London, where his mastery of watercolour made him a major figure of the
caption: Thomas Creswick, Distant view of Birmingham (1828).
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