After a brilliant academic career, Foweraker became a milling engineer. Losing three fingers in an accident, he took up painting professionally in 1898. For the first twenty years of his new artistic life he often travelled to Southern Spain, and many of his exhibited pictures then are of Spanish subjects, suffused with romantic atmosphere. When in the evenings the people of the hot Spanish city of Seville emerged into the cool night, he set down his impressions. Glassy tones of blue and green moonlight cast deep shadows, dappling whitewashed walls as if under water, flecked here and there with dashes of orange body-colour to show lit lamps.