Joseph Southall (1861 - 1944). Joseph Edward Southall RWS NEAC RBSA was an English painter associated with the Arts and Crafts movement. A leading figure in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century revival of painting in tempera, Southall was the leader of the Birmingham Group of Artist-Craftsmen—one of the last outposts of Romanticism in the visual arts, and an important link between the later Pre-Raphaelites and the turn of the century Slade Symbolists. A lifelong Quaker, Southall was an active socialist and pacifist, initially as a radical member of the Liberal Party and later of the Independent Labour Party. Southall was elected an Associate of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists in 1898 and Member in 1902. He 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. His father, a grocer, died a little over a year later, and the young Southall and his mother moved to Edgbaston, Birmingham to live with his mother's family. After an education at Quaker schools including Ackworth School and Bootham School in York, Southall returned to Birmingham in 1878 and was articled as a trainee with the leading local architects' practice Martin & Chamberlain, while studying painting part-time at the Birmingham School of Art. Both institutions were steeped in the spirit of John Ruskin and the Arts and Crafts movement: architect John Henry Chamberlain was a founder and trustee of the Guild of St George, while the Principal of the School of Art, Edward R. Taylor, was a pioneer of Arts and Crafts education and a friend of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. 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. With this in mind he undertook several tours in Europe. In 1882 he visited Bayeux, Rouen and Amiens in Northern France. The following year, having left Martin & Chamberlain, he spent thirteen weeks in Italy, visiting Pisa, Florence, Siena, Orvieto, Rome, Bologna, Padua, Venice and Milan. Italy was to have a profound impact. The frescoes of Benozzo Gozzoli were to inspire a deep admiration for the painters of the Italian Renaissance who-before the practice of oil painting spread to Italy from Northern Europe in the sixteenth century-worked largely in egg-based tempera. Forty years later Southall recalled: the thrill of joy which I experienced when, without any knowledge of what I was about to see, I stepped inside the enchanting cloisters of the great Campo Santo of Pisa. There I found myself at 21 years of age face to face with a vast series of frescoes, so quiet and yet so gay, so reticent in manner and so lively in essence that words must ever fail to convey even the faintest expression of what I felt. Southall's decisive moment came while viewing Two Venetian Ladies by Vittore Carpaccio in the Museo Correr in Venice. Ruskin's discussion of the painting in St Marks' Rest, the volume that Southall was using as a guide, included Ruskin's remark that I must note in passing that many of the qualities which I have been in the habit of praising in Tintoret and Carpaccio, as consummate achievements in oil-painting are, as I have found lately, either in tempera altogether or tempera with oil above. And I am disposed to think that ultimately tempera will be found the proper material for the greater number of most delightful subjects. On his return to Birmingham Southall conducted his first experiments in tempera painting at the School of Art. Initially, however, Southall's discovery of Italian tempera painting had less effect than his studies of Italian architecture. Southall's uncle George Baker-a friend of John Ruskin and Master of Ruskin's Guild of St George-passed some of Southall's Italian sketches on to Ruskin himself, who remarked that he had never seen architecture better drawn. Ruskin was so impressed by Southall's architectural understanding that in 1885 he gave him his first major commission: to design a museum for the Guild of St George to stand on his uncle's land near Bewdley, Worcestershire. 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. Southall later recalled my chance as an architect vanished and years of obscurity with not a little bitterness of soul followed.