Art of Birmingham

[6] 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.

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".

[38] 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.

The most prominent members of a generation of young painters from the School of Art were elected as the Society of Artists' first associates in the 1860s, including Walter Langley, William Wainwright, Frank Bramley and Edwin Harris.

[42] At a time when the controversial new movement was still exciting the hostility of the London press, the 1852 exhibition of Millais' Ophelia at the annual exhibition of the Birmingham Society of Artists provoked the radical Birmingham Journal – the town's most popular newspaper – to display a front page article analysing the picture, praising its "erratic genius" and "independent thought" and contrasting it with the "traditions of the schools" and the "slavish reproduction of the academy models".

[43] Further Pre-Raphaelite works were sought the following year, with Holman Hunt's Strayed Sheep being singled out as "one that ought to be studied ... with an intelligent appreciation of its peculiar beauties and special teachings.

[45] By contrast the more broadly based economy of Birmingham was built upon on small units of production and a skilled craft-based workforce, leading to an unprecedented demand for modern paintings from the rapidly expanding and newly wealthy middle class,[46] and a widespread belief in the moral and political implications of visual aesthetics, influenced by Augustus Pugin and the Gothic Revival and driven by its direct relevance to Birmingham's day-to-day economic reality.

[47] It was from this environment that Edward Burne-Jones emerged to become the most influential of all Birmingham artists, establishing himself as the dominant figure of late-Victorian English art and bringing the spirit of the Pre-Raphaelites decisively into the mainstream.

[53] Breaking down the distinction between the fine and applied arts was a key aim of the movement, and Birmingham Group artists practiced across a variety of disciplines, producing stained glass, jewellery, metalwork, embroidery, hand printed books and furniture as well as pictures.

[56] The group's greatest collective work was the later decoration of the interior of the chapel of Madresfield Court near Malvern in 1902, which featured frescoes and stained glass by Payne, an altarpiece by Gere and a crucifix designed and made by Arthur and Georgie Gaskin.

[58] Southall himself has been seen as a precursor of surrealism, with John Russell Taylor writing that "there is undoubtedly an authentic strangeness in the way he saw things ... we are much more likely to find ourselves thinking of Magritte and Balthus and Chirico than of anyone nearer to this apparently stick-in-the-mud Arts-and-Craftsman.

", criticising the RBSA as being controlled by "a small group of men who have arrogated to themselves the responsibility for deciding what is and isn't art ... entirely out of sympathy with modern movements ... having stood still for at least twenty years" [63] By 1930 even Solomon Kaines Smith, the keeper of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and himself hardly a radical figure, was commenting in the Birmingham Post that "you are actually reducing and throwing back the possibilities and progress of your own city by basing yourself solely on 1890".

[64] The opening of the Ruskin Galleries in Chamberlain Square by John Gibbins in 1925 provided an outlet for the gradual emergence of more progressive generation of Birmingham artists.

[65] Away from this group more progressive figures were few and their connections with Birmingham slight: Malcolm Drummond, later a member of the Camden Town Group, was educated at The Oratory School in Edgbaston;[67] and Henry Tonks, who became a stalwart of the New English Art Club and was to train an entire generation of English modernists at London's Slade School of Art around the start of the 20th century, was brought up in a family of Birmingham brass foundry proprietors.

[68] The most radical artist associated with the city during this period was David Bomberg, who was born to a Polish-Jewish family on Sutton Street in the Lee Bank area of Birmingham in 1890.

Growing up in Whitechapel in the East End of London he returned to Birmingham to train as a lithographer[69] before studying under the Birmingham-born Henry Tonks at the Slade School of Art.

[72] Gerald Brockhurst – dubbed a "young Botticelli" when he entered the Birmingham School of Art at the age of 12 – became one of the best known and most celebrated portraitists, first in England and then in the United States, painting over 600 portraits including those of Marlene Dietrich and the Duchess of Windsor.

The London group, it was felt, "did not understand surrealism",[78] reducing it to a mere continuation of English romanticism, and the Birmingham artists concentrated instead on building links with what they saw as the more authentic surrealists on the continent.

[82] Robert Melville played a key role in the conception of Toni del Renzio's publication Arson in 1942[83] and Maddox was the organiser with John Banting of 1940's notoriously confrontational Surrealism Today exhibition.

[84] In 1947 Maddox and Bridgwater featured among only six English artists selected by André Breton for the final International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris,[80] but with British surrealism viewed as a spent force in the post-war era the group broke up in the early 1950s.

[89] Later that decade John Salt's obsessively detailed paintings of cars and mobile homes in the American landscape made him the only major English artist among the pioneers of photorealism.

[90] More locally, the formation of the Ikon Gallery in the 1960s provided a focus for a distinctive group of artists including David Prentice, Trevor Denning, Robert Groves, Jesse Bruton and Sylvani Merilion.

[111] 20th century Birmingham sculpture was dominated by the figure of William Bloye, who combined the arts and crafts tradition of Benjamin Creswick with the avant-garde edge of Eric Gill, with whom he worked at Ditchling in Sussex.

[111] Several generations of sculptors who trained under Bloye at the School of Art later worked as assistants at his studio in Small Heath before establishing themselves independently, including notable figures such as John Poole, Gordon Herickx, Ian Walters and Raymond Mason.

[111] In 1972, a 550 cm (18 ft)-tall, fibreglass Statue of King Kong, by London pop artist Nicholas Monro, was erected in The Bull Ring as part of a public art initiative.

The Victorian "father of art photography", Oscar Gustave Rejlander lived and worked at nearby Wolverhampton, and was a founder member of the Birmingham Photographic Society.

[156] It was this sense of extreme understatement and almost childlike innocence that contrasted with the sophisticated and symbolically charged Celtic mysticism of the Glasgow style of Charles Rennie Mackintosh – the other distinctive local Arts and Crafts tradition of the time[157] – and lay behind its considerable contemporary reputation and its widespread influence on later modernism.

Edward R. Taylor's educational developments in Birmingham in the 1880s were a direct influence on William Lethaby's innovations at London's Central School of Arts and Crafts from 1896,[158] which in turn provided the model for the establishment of the Bauhaus by Walter Gropius in 1919.

The silverware that launched the Cymric line for Liberty & Co. in 1901 – one of the most widely recognized archetypes of Art Nouveau worldwide, and work which resulted in Art Nouveau becoming known as the "Stile Liberty" in continental Europe[162] – was manufactured by the Birmingham silversmiths W. H. Haseler to the designs of local metalwork craftsmen Oliver Baker, Bernard Cuzner and Albert Edward Jones, all of whom were associated with the Vittoria Street School of Jewellery and Silversmithing.

[176] Attracting celebrity owners including all four Beatles, Steve McQueen and Brigitte Bardot,[177] its influence extended far beyond automotive design as it came to symbolise Britain in the Swinging Sixties.