Geoffrey Birkbeck, born in Norwich in 1875 and educated at Eton College, was a watercolorist and muralist notable for his landscape paintings of Norfolk and Italy.

His first solo show took place in 1903 at Carfax Gallery and was followed by other shows at New Dudley, Goupil and Walker’s Galleries.

Birkbeck was a member of RBA and Norwich Art Circle and was represented by Norwich Castle Museum, where he participated in numerous shows. Birkbeck also published a book entitled Old Norfolk Houses , containing reproductions of his works and showing the influence of the baroque style on his practice.,/p>

He died in 1954 aged 79.

Reference Bibliography:
Buckman D., 2006, Artists in Britain since 1945, Vol 1, Art Dictionaries Ltd, Bristol

Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.