Myles Birket Foster, R.W.S. (1825-1899)

The Art Journal, loc.cit., reviewing the Summer exhibition at the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours, 1861, wrote of the present work 'Birket Foster's "Wark's Burn, Northumberland" (no 7) is pleasantly mellow in colour; he may be congratulated on the breadth he gets into his work when it is remembered that the entire surface of his paper is worked over in stipple, though it is not so apparent in this drawing as in some others'.

Abraham Haworth, an avid art collector, was born in Bolton and founded Abraham Haworth & Co., a cotton broking firm in the 1880s. His brother Jesse is noted for the donations he made, both of pictures by artists such as Holman Hunt, Millais and Turner, and of money, to the Manchester Museum, which included the funding for an extension completed in 1912 and named the Jesse Haworth Building. In 2006 three watercolours by J.M.W. Turner that had previously been in the collection of Abraham Haworth (A View of the Roman Forum (1818), Orfordness (circa 1827) and Lake Lucerne (1845)) were acquired by the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester. Like the present watercolour, these works had been purchased by Abraham Haworth from Agnew's who, at that time, had an office in Manchester serving the region's increasingly prosperous industrial and mercantile collectors.
Warks Burn flows through a dramatic rocky gorge from Wark Forest, west of Stonehaugh, Northumberland, to meet the River North Tyne at Wark not far from where Birket Foster grew up in North Shields to the east of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.