Joseph Southall
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Joseph Edward Southall (b. Nottingham 1861 - d. 1944) was a British Arts and Crafts painter.
He was a member of the Birmingham Group school, one of the last outposts of Romanticism in the visual arts, and an important link between the last embers of the Pre-Raphaelites and the new Slade Symbolists.
He lived and worked in Birmingham, England, and was long associated with the Municipal School of Art at Margaret Street, Birmingham, which is now BIAD.
After his education, at a wide variety of schools, he toured the great cathedrals of northern France (as had Ruskin). A few years later, inspired by the writings of Ruskin, he visited Italy to see the architecture. Southall's uncle, George Baker, was a friend of Ruskin, and Master of Ruskin's Guild of St George.
He painted a variety of subjects during his career. These included mythological, romantic, and religious subjects. He also undertook portraits and landscapes, and ventured into murals, furniture decoration, jewelled frames, lacework, and engravings. He was known for his mastery of the color red, the clean and clear light in his works, and for his paintings on the theme of Beauty and the Beast. His style changed with the times, and from the 1920s until the late 1930s he painted in the newer styles that were then fashionable.
He married in 1903. The son of Quakers, he was a lifelong pacifist and a Morris-ian quietist anarchist.
[edit] Further reading
- Joseph Southall 1861-1944, Artist - Craftsman. Birmingham Art Gallery catalogue, 1980.
