16 Facts About Joseph Southall

Joseph Edward Southall RWS NEAC RBSA was an English painter associated with the Arts and Crafts movement.

Joseph Southall was elected an Associate of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists in 1898 and Member in 1902.

Joseph Southall became President of the Society in 1939 and stayed in this post until his death in 1944.

Joseph Southall was born to a Quaker family in Nottingham in 1861.

Joseph Southall however was frustrated by his architectural training, feeling that an architect should have a broader understanding of craft disciplines such as painting and carving.

Joseph Southall made a second trip to Italy in 1886 to research this commission, but the project was abandoned when Ruskin revived his original plans to build a museum in Sheffield.

Joseph Southall later recalled "my chance as an architect vanished and years of obscurity with not a little bitterness of soul followed".

Joseph Southall worked on a series of large tempera paintings on mythological subjects that were widely exhibited across Europe and the United States.

Joseph Southall was elected an Associate of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists in 1898 and a full Member in 1902, a member of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1903 and of the Art Workers Guild and Union Internationale des Beaux-Arts et des Lettres in 1910.

Post-war, with his reputation well established, Joseph Southall produced fewer of the epic tempera works that made his critical name.

Joseph Southall was elected a member of the Royal Watercolour Society and the New English Art Club in 1925, and in 1939 was elected President of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists - a post he held until his death.

In 1937, Joseph Southall underwent an operation from which he never really recovered.

Joseph Southall painted a variety of subjects during his career, including mythological, romantic, and religious subjects, portraits and landscapes.

Joseph Southall was known for his mastery of the colour red, the clean and clear light in his works, and for his paintings on the theme of Beauty and the Beast.

In common with other Birmingham Group members Joseph Southall practiced a variety of crafts besides painting, including murals, furniture decoration, lacework, book illustration and engravings.

Joseph Southall politics were strongly influenced by the pacifism of his Quaker faith.