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. David Cox originally trained as a painter of theatrical scenery; Walter Langley and David Bomberg were both lithographers; the artists of the Birmingham Group practiced metalwork, book illustration and stained glass manufacture as well as painting; while backgrounds in advertising and commercial graphic design were key influences on the surrealism of Conroy Maddox and the pop art of Peter Phillips.
Birmingham's artistic influence has extended well beyond its borders: David Cox was a major figure of the Golden Age of English watercolour and an early precursor of Impressionism; Edward Burne-Jones was the dominant figure of late-Victorian English art and an influence on Symbolism, the Aesthetic movement, and Art Nouveau; David Bomberg was one of the pioneers of English modernism; and Peter Phillips was one of the key figures in the birth of pop art. The sculptor Raymond Mason and the designers John Baskerville, Augustus Pugin, Harry Weedon and Alec Issigonis are all major figures in the history of their fields, while more widely the city has been a notable centre of the Arts and Crafts, Pictorialist and Surrealist movements, and within the fields of metalwork, typography, sculpture, printmaking, photography and stained glass.
Painting, drawing and printmaking
The Midlands Enlightenment and the Birmingham School of landscape
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 medium's "Golden Age". In 1841 Cox returned to Birmingham to live in Harborne and concentrate on painting in oils. Long overshadowed by the fame of his earlier watercolours, these later works have more recently attracted attention as "one of the greatest, but least recognised, achievements of any British painter." Cox's technique and approach in paintings such as Rhyl Sands (c. 1854) – described by the Tate as "without parallel in British landscape painting of the 1850s" – have led to his being seen, particularly within France, as an important precursor of Impressionism. His pictures were exhibited in Paris to wide acclaim in 1855 and are known to have been studied by Monet and Pissarro during their stay in London in 1870.
Institutional development
Artistic activity in late Georgian Birmingham was not restricted to landscape painting. A century later the London-based Magazine of Art could describe Birmingham as "perhaps the most artistic town in England", and the changes that would result in this transformation had already started by the 1780s. A local trade directory of 1785 lists twenty four professional artists, including the portraitist James Millar, the still life painter Moses Haughton and the portrait miniature painter James Bisset. Of widest influence was the Birmingham School of engravers – a separate group to the landscape artists but emerging similarly from the drawing academies of Joseph Barber, Vincent Barber and Samuel Lines. Formed around the younger Barber's pupils William Radclyffe, James Tibbitts Willmore and John Pye, and Lines' pupil William Wyon, this group were to dominate high-quality European printmaking in the 1850s and 1860s and revolutionise the art of book illustration, bringing contemporary art to a much wider public than ever before.; ;
The first decades of the 19th century saw the gradual development of the institutions that would come to dominate the artistic life of Victorian Birmingham. In 1809 a group of eight artists including Samuel Lines, Charles Barber and Vincent Barber opened an academy of life drawing in Peck Lane, now the site of New Street railway station. This held its first exhibition of members' work in 1814 as the Birmingham Academy of Arts, and was refounded as the Birmingham Society of Arts under the patronage of wealthy local businessmen in 1821.
The society was dogged by continual tension between its two roles: to its members the society was primarily for promoting Birmingham's artists and exhibiting their work, but to its wealthy patrons its importance was more as a training ground for designers needed for the town's manufacturing industries.; This gave rise to a temporary split in 1821 over the patrons' decision to hold an exhibition of old masters instead of members' works. A second, permanent, split took place in 1842, the patrons forming the Society of Arts and Government School of Design - later the Birmingham School of Art - while the artists formed the separate Birmingham Society of Artists, which received royal patronage in 1868 as the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists.
By the 1820s Birmingham was supporting a vigorous market for contemporary art. While most British towns other than London relied on booksellers and carvers-and-gilders for the sale of pictures, Birmingham had specialist art dealers such as Allen Everitt – whose Artists' Repository and Exhibition of Pictures in Union Street opened in 1811 and which held regular exhibitions from 1817 – and Jones' Pantechnetheca in New Street, which opened in 1824 and where the walls of the picture gallery were "hung with a succession of paintings by the most able ancient and modern masters". An 1819 letter to the painter John Constable remarked that "we have picture sellers everywhere in Birmingham".
Birmingham was also an important centre for Victorian art patronage, as the home of major collectors such as Joseph Gillott, Edwin Sharp and William Bullock. Gillott in particular had one of the largest and most important collections of the day. An early patron of Turner, he lay at the centre of a nationwide network of dealers, collectors and artists.
With this growth in Birmingham's artistic organisation came a more established artistic community. Birmingham had had only four professional artists in 1800, but by 1827 the overwhelming majority of the 67 local exhibitors at that year's Society of Arts exhibition were earning their living from the arts, as portraitists, miniaturists, engravers, or painters of still life or landscape. Helen Allingham was the first of a notable series of woman artists to study at the School of Art from the 1850s, that later featured Florence Camm, Kate Bunce and Georgie Gaskin.