Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Softcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> His apprenticeship as a japanning painter where he learnt by copying from engravings and the master painter Mr Gower was the only artistic training Bird received. In this he was not very different from many artists of his time. At the end of the 18th century apart from the Royal Academy Schools there was little training available to student painters. Most artists began their careers as assistants to other painters or as engravers or manufactory designers. In 1807 the magazine The Director deploring the lack of artistic Academies in England commented that there were “only three kinds of employment which present themselves to the young student in painting Of these the most humble but not the least useful is that of penciling for the manufacturer: the second that of designing for the press… popular prints… The third. the most general is portrait painting”. 2 Nevertheless “tea-board painter” was a term of critical derision and japanning was not a very reputable background from which to begin an artistic career. Whilst at the japanning works Bird began painting pictures which he raffled or sold for a few guineas at the New Angel Inn. This success encouraged him to give up the japanning trade at the end of his apprenticeship and take a painting room a short distance from Horsefair now Wulfruna Street. Bird seems to have been less successful as an independent artist than he had hoped however and at the invitation of Thomas Corser “an ardent admirer of the Arts and ever afterwards his firm friend”? Bird moved to Bristol in about 17944 He is sometimes said to have also worked in Birmingham but there was a tendency at the time to refer to within 20 miles of the city as Birmingham the whole of the manufacturing area and he probably moved directly to Bristol. At the end of the 18th century Bristol was a major city and large port. It had a fashionable watering-place at Hotwells and could offer an artist correspondingly greater opportunities than a Midland town. (LL)