Joseph Southall. 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 mov