FREDERICK WALKER
I think it was a criticism of Sidney Colvin’s in the _Pall Mall Gazette_
upon his picture called “The Plough” that first drew me to a closer
study of Fred Walker’s work. Sidney Colvin had preceded me as Art Critic
of the _Pall Mall_, and I am very conscious that in my first efforts in
art criticism I closely modelled myself upon his style.
He and Bernal Payne had already done much to direct public attention to
the new movement in Art before I entered the field. And it was not
wonderful, in view of Colvin’s eloquent advocacy of the men whom I most
deeply admired, that I should have been drawn to the art of Fred Walker,
whose talent he had particularly distinguished.
A little later I got to know Walker himself, but he was difficult to
know well, not by reason of any deliberate reserve, but because of an
unconquerable shyness which was deeply rooted in his character. Shy in
his ordinary converse as a man, he was no less so in regard to his
pictures. As one entered his studio he would always turn the work upon
which he was engaged with its face to the wall, and
[Illustration: A WOMAN IN THE SNOW
From _Good Words_.
By FREDRICK WALKER, A.R.A., R.W.S.
Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel.
(Reproduced from their _Fifty Years’ Work_.)
_To face page 103._
]
could rarely be induced to allow his visitor any glimpse of it.
Shortly after his death, which occurred in 1875, I wrote the
introductory note to the catalogue of his collected works exhibited in
Bond Street, and, wishing for some closer knowledge of the man than I
could boast, I had recourse to Mr. George Leslie, who had known him long
and well.
I find an interesting letter of his written to me about that time, and
concerning, among many other things, Walker’s stay in Algiers, where he
had gone for his health. Leslie had asked me to meet Miss Jeykell, who
had been in Algiers at the time, but as I was unable to accept his
invitation he very kindly jotted down for me some notes of his
conversation with her, adding at the same time some interesting
reflections upon Walker’s character which throw much light upon his
temperament as an artist.
“Miss Jeykell,” he writes to me in a letter dated February 10, 1876,
“was there with Madam Bodichon when Walker arrived, and came home with
him. She says that nothing could have exceeded his delight on arriving,
with the light, bright climate and the novelty of everything, and he had
immediately a great wish to send for his sister to come out and live
there. But very soon, in about a fortnight or three weeks, his strong
family affections began to tell on him and he grew terribly home-sick,
and gradually took a sort of horror for the whole place. This feeling
grew and grew on him, and he became quite ill. He longed to be back in
England. With almost despair he said if he could only be in a hansom cab
once again he should be quite happy. Madam Bodichon and Miss Jeykell
one day took him out with them for a driving excursion round the country
and along the sea-shore, and this, she said, seemed to be one of the
only days he enjoyed thoroughly. The shores were very picturesque and
rocky, and they visited beautiful little bays of pure sand and quaint
shells, where Fred Walker strolled about and seemed very much struck, no
doubt contemplating his intended picture.
“They left him alone when he seemed to wish it, and he sat gazing at the
rocks and sea in deep thought. He had his flute with him, and would
accompany Miss Jeykell, who used to sing. She said, what I can endorse
myself, that he played in a manner quite peculiar, full of tender
feeling and prettiness.
“Finally his illness and his growing disgust of the place grew so much
worse that they got quite anxious about him, and when Miss Jeykell and
her companion were about to return home they proposed to take him with
them. In a perfectly helpless way he eagerly accepted the kindness,
allowing them to do everything for him, even packing his pictures for
him, securing his passage, and paying his bills, etc. He went on board
the steamer so ill that Miss Jeykell felt anxious about him, fearing he
might not survive till he reached home.
“But the morning after they started, when she had gone to look for him
in his cabin, she found him walking the deck in his little
shooting-jacket, and quite revived with the idea of home. He relapsed,
however, in his journey through France, and the hatred of Algiers
returned at the very sound of the French tongue.
“They arrived, however, quite safely at last, and Miss Jeykell at
Charing Cross Station said, ‘There, Mr. Walker, is a hansom cab.’ He got
in, waved his hand in a playful excited way, and that was the last time
she ever saw him.”
And then follows a very interesting comparison between the characters of
Fred Walker and Sir Edwin Landseer, which Mr. Leslie was well qualified
to make, as he had known them both for many years.
“I used to see them both,” he writes, “for several years during the same
time, and so was always being reminded one of the other. They were both
disposed to be a little tyrannical in disposition; they both expected
everything to be done for them. They were both extremely sensitive to
criticism and public opinion, and they both possessed a tender and
intense feeling for music.
“Walker could not play before friends, as the tears would run down his
cheeks, and I have heard Landseer sing with the tears in his eyes.
Landseer had not much voice, but a very sweet pathetic feeling. They
both had strong family affections, and each possessed a devoted sister
who ministered to their every want.
“They each had the same reluctance to show their pictures. Even when
they had gone to the Exhibition, they would fret and worry and make
themselves ill as to what would be thought of them. They both possessed
an intense ambition to excel in Art. Walker once confessed to me that
he meant to be _the_ best artist, or the ‘very top,’ as he said, and
Landseer had quite the same ruling passion.
“They both had a keen sense of humour, and both drew admirable
caricatures. Landseer would, with three or four lines, give you the very
essence of any one’s face, and you know how well poor Fred Walker did
this. They were both very silent about Art, or rather about pictures;
they neither of them had very much education, but somehow were far more
neat in their choice of words than most other artists.
“They both were extremely fastidious in their work, altering and
altering again and again; often a picture took up a year or two.
“Lastly, in dress they were something alike, both very fond of rather a
sporting style, and indeed they were both decided sportsmen in taste.
They were both, too, when I knew them, tinged with a kind of despairing
feeling of melancholy, not of a slow languishing kind, but with a quick
intense fever, covered over with a pretty sparkle of wit and
cheerfulness when in the society of friends. The thing that always
struck me about Walker and Landseer was, that the young man of thirty
was like the other of sixty, and I have often said to Marks, ‘He could
never live, he has already arrived at what is the end of Landseer.’”
Poor Walker died in 1875 at the early age of thirty-five. He had
exhibited once in the Royal Academy after his return from Algiers, and
it was while his picture was hanging upon the walls at Burlington House
that we heard of his sudden death, due to a violent chill he had
contracted during a fishing excursion in Scotland.
It was not very long before his death that I paid my last visit to his
studio, and although, as was his custom, the canvas upon which he was
engaged was speedily wheeled round and turned with its face to the wall,
I caught just a glimpse of his subject, which afterwards formed the
matter of our talk. It was to be called “The Unknown Land,” and it is
characteristic of the whole bent of his talent, and of the special way
in which his imagination worked, that the last of his designs, left a
mere fragment at the date of his death, was no more than a development
of a drawing which he had contributed years before to the pages of _Once
a Week_.
But it is to be acknowledged that Walker was never prolific in his
inventions in the ordinary sense of the term. Nothing is more remarkable
in his gradual progress than the strong and enduring attachment he
displayed to certain motives in composition that at first found
expression in his boyhood. As his art advanced, this inspiration of his
earlier days was taken up again and enforced with all the riper
resources of his manhood.
His great picture of “The Bathers” must have already been suggested to
him by one of a series of illustrations representing the seasons which
had also appeared in the pages of _Once a Week_, and many another
instance might be cited which would tend to show the strong allegiance
of his maturity to ideas which had first won his devotion as a boy.
Mr. Leslie’s vivid sketch of Walker, and his just appreciation of his
character, corresponds closely enough with the man as I knew him in the
later days of his life. He seemed to me to be always to the last degree
fastidious in his own judgment upon his work, and so exacting in his
demands upon himself that I think it was from this source there sprang
up the disinclination which he always showed to submitting his pictures
to the criticism of others.
The struggle he went through with himself in endeavouring to carry to a
successful issue the thought that had formed in his brain was so severe
that it left him, when the task was complete, with no courage to face an
opinion which might, as he feared, be even less favourable than his own.
But although he shunned any discussion upon pictures painted by himself,
he was, as I recall him now, always eager and enthusiastic in his talk
of the wider and more general ideals of Art, enthusiastic also in his
occasional references to those among his contemporaries whom he
specially admired. Looking back upon his achievement now, it is easy to
perceive, and it would be folly not to acknowledge, that some of that
higher beauty which he sought to find in those rustic subjects that were
dear to him was occasionally imposed upon reality by a conscious and
wilful reference to the beauty of the antique.
But even if this criticism be admittedly just, his claims as a painter
remain undisturbed. The added grace that he bestowed upon reality was
resident in nature itself, and there is reason to think that if time had
allowed his powers to be fully developed he would have achieved what he
sought without direct dependence upon classic example. The two separate
elements of his art--his direct
[Illustration: LUCY GRAY, or SOLITUDE
To-night will be a stormy night,
You to the town must go,
And take the lantern, child, to light
Your mother through the snow.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.
By Sir JOHN GILBERT, R.A., P.R.W.S.
Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel.
(Reproduced from their _Fifty Years’ Work_.)
_By permission of Messrs. George Routledge and Sons, Ltd._
_To face page 109._
]
and searching study of the facts of the actual world, and his passionate
love of the beauty of the antique--were in process of being united but
they were not yet absolutely fused in one. His early death left the
story of his art life incomplete, but there is enough and more than
enough to vindicate his position in our school.
On the occasion of one of my rare visits to his studio he had given me
some brief account of the first years of his studentship. When he first
quitted school at the age of sixteen he occupied himself in copying from
the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum. For a while his purely artistic
studies were interrupted by his apprenticeship to an architect, but
after only eighteen months of labour that was never congenial to him we
find him once more at the Museum, while during the evenings of this
period he attended the classes in Leigh’s School in Newman Street,
making there the acquaintance of several other young artists with whom
he remained on terms of closest friendship during the rest of his life.
A little later he entered the school of the Royal Academy, and about the
same time began to employ himself with drawing on the wood which he
learnt from Mr. T. W. Whymper, in whose establishment he remained for a
period of three years.
At that date Sir John Gilbert was the accepted model for young men who
desired to succeed in book illustration, and I remember Walker telling
me that in all his earlier essays he was rigidly held to a strict
conformity with Gilbert’s style. But it was not long before he formed a
method of his own, and, soon after _Once a Week_ was established in
1859, Walker became a constant contributor to its pages. Later again he
sought and found employment from Mr. Thackeray on the _Cornhill
Magazine_, where he illustrated the editor’s own story of _Philip_.
He used often to tell me of his visits to Thackeray’s house, where he
went to settle with the great novelist the subject of the next
illustration. During a considerable part of the time Thackeray was ill
and confined to his room, and the young draughtsman would sit at the
side of the bed and listen to the details of the story as they came from
Thackeray’s own lips.
[Illustration: THE UNJUST JUDGE
From _The Parables of our Lord_.
By Sir J. E. MILLAIS, Bart., P.R.A.
Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel.
(Reproduced from their _Fifty Years’ Work_.)
_To face page 111._
]