Edward Bird

Edward Bird (1772, Wolverhampton - 1819) was an English genre painter who spent most of his working life in Bristol. He enjoyed a few years of popularity in London, where he challenged the current dominance of Sir David Wilkie in the genre painting field, before moving on to history painting, specialising in battle scenes.

The son of a carpenter, Bird received no formal artistic training, but developed his skills through apprenticeship as a japanning artist painting tea trays. In 1794 he moved to Bristol, where he married Martha Dodrell and pursued a career in varied artistic commissions: portaiture, book illustrations, and church painting.

In 1809, he exhibited at the Royal Academy "Good News", a genre portrait of an old soldier. Placed next to Wilkie's "The Cut Finger", it attracted attention, and Bird's popularity grew when the Prince Regent bought his "The Country Choristers" and commissioned "Blind Man's Buff". His works also include the "Field of Chevy Chase" and the "Day after the Battle", which was pronounced his masterpiece.

Bird was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1812, was appointed historical painter to Princess Charlotte in 1813, and elected a full member in 1815.

Plagued by ill-health and unable to paint in the last year of his life, Bird died in 1819. The following year a successful retrospective exhibition of his work was shown at the Bristol Fire Office. His work directly inspired a number of Bristol artists and indirectly fostered Bristol's provincial artistic community, contributing to the development of the Bristol school in the 1820s.

References

*Francis Greenacre, "Bird, Edward (1772–1819)", "Oxford Dictionary of National Biography", Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2443 accessed 1 July 2007]
*London. Edward Bird at the Geffrye Museum, Nicholas Alfrey, "The Burlington Magazine", Vol. 124, No. 951 (Jun., 1982), p. 372+375+377