Happy Days

Birket Foster, like many Victorian watercolourists, did not use pure, transparent watercolour but preferred to use bodycolour (watercolour mixed with opaque white). Many of his pictures include figures of country-dwellers, milk maids, farmers' wives and rustic children, always idealised and prettily dressed. The hard labour of the agricultural workers is never shown. This sentimentalised vision of the countryside had immense appeal to Victorian collectors.