‘Europe Peace or Famine - Which’, by Joseph Southall
The Edgbaston Quaker artist Joseph Southall contributed occasional prints to Sylvia Pankhurst's anti-war suffragette broadsheet 'The Woman's Dreadnought'; the paper later became the 'Workers' Dreadnought' ...
‘No child can resist’, Picture Post
Advertisers used images of children to catch the viewer’s eye. As families became more affluent they also targeted children as consumers. These adverts for Birmingham made ‘Bird’s Custard’ represent children ...
'A Medical Board', by W.L. Sherwood
This caricature by Staff-Sergeant W.L. Sherwood presents a sardonic view of the Medical Boards, which decided the fates of many soldiers during the First World War. Consisting of a panel of both military ...
'A Patient's Nightmare', by Will Adams
This grim satirical caricature conveys something of the deeply divided emotional response experienced by soldiers who were surgical patients in the Edgbaston Southern General Hospital. Although wounded ...
Ann Street School, Birmingham
Oil painting by Alfred H. Green (c.1822-?).
Past schooling is brought vibrantly to life in this painting. We can see infants sewing, reading, listening, watching, falling asleep, crying, putting on ...
'Being Marked Out'
This is one of several caricatures published by wounded soldiers in the Edgbaston WW1 military hospital magazine that express deeply conflicted feelings towards the medical and administrative staff. ...
Cadbury Barges
Frank Newbould’s picture unites the corporate Cadbury view of the ‘factory in a garden’ with a ‘Roses and Castles’ folk image of canal life. Neither does justice to economic and social realities, where ...
Cadbury Works
Michael Reilly’s picture depicts an industrial yet wholesome scene and owes much to its vibrant colours. The polluting aspects of chocolate production are minimised with chimneys seemingly devoid of any ...
Calthorpe Park
Painting depicting the opening of Calthorpe Park, by Samuel Lines Snr.
Carpenter’s Mill, with Birmingham in the distance
This drawing gives a vivid impression of Edgbaston's rural landscape in the nineteenth century. St Thomas's Church, The Windmill on Holloway Head and St Martin's Church are visible in the distance.
'Charity', by Bourguereau
Oil painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905).
For the early Christian Church ‘Charity’ was the ‘mother of all virtues’. From at least the 16th century artists and poets depicted Charity as ...
Cocoa - The Story of its Cultivation, illustrated by Frank Newbould
Frank Newbould’s designs for Cocoa: the Story of its Cultivation, were in a bold graphic style. He used vibrant colours to illustrate some of the key stages in cocoa cultivation, from harvesting through ...
David Cox - 'A Gypsy Encampment'
Artists have often sentimentalised gypsies, using them as local colour in idealised rural settings. Here, however, it appears that David Cox has sketched these people from life, and they are the main ...
Domestic Interior, by Reginald Edgecombe
The Edgecombe drawings demonstrate that urban planners in Birmingham were considering the internal layout as much as the external appearance of new houses. This sketch illustrates the creative processes ...
Drawing of a Middlemore Girl
As an Edgbastonian, John Middlemore was proudly celebrated in the pages of the Edgbastonia magazine:
‘A benevolent Edgbaston gentleman who has solved one of the difficult social problems of modern ...
Edgbaston with Tower of Edgbaston Church
This drawing shows how rural Edgbaston was in the mid-nineteenth century. The tower of Edgbaston Old Church is visible in the background.
Fables and Illustrations, by Joseph Southall
This powerful nightmare vision of a weapon of mass destruction is by the Quaker artist Joseph Southall who lived and worked in Edgbaston. 'The Obliterator' appeared in his anti-war pamphlet 'Fables and ...
'Going to bed', by Joscelyne Gaskin
Joscelyne Gaskin (1903-1993) was the daughter of the Birmingham artists and designers Arthur Joseph Gaskin and Georgie Evelyn Cave France. Her parents both worked in a variety of media, with Georgie initially ...