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The Popular Library
of Art
The Popular Library of Art
ALBRECHT DURER (37 Illustrations).
By LiNA ECKENSTEIN.
ROSSETTI (53 Illustrations).
By Ford Madox Hueffer.
REMBRANDT (61 Illustrations).
By AuGUSTE Breal.
FRED WALKER (32 Illustrations and
Photogravure).
By Clementina Black.
MILLET (35 Illustrations).
By ROMAIN ROLLAND.
LEONARDO DA VINCI.
By Dr Georg Gronau.
CRUIKSHANK.
By W. H. Chesson.
HOGARTH.
By Edward Garnett.
Others in Preparation.
FREDERICK
WALKER
BY
CLEMENTINA BLACK
AUTHOR OP
"the princess DESIREE," <fec.
%
LONDON: DUCKWORTH & CO.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
NO '^17
PRINTED BY
TURNBULL AND SPKARS
EDINBURGH
^y
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
The Harbour of Refuge (Tate Gallery).
{By permission of Messrs Thos. Agnew S^
Sons, proprieto7*s of the copyright) Frontispiece
Old Age ........ 7
^FEEPING Cupid. (By permission of Messrs
Smith, Elder &; Co.) . . . . 17
Frederick Walker. From a Photograph . 27
Invitation Card — Moray Minstrels^ 1871 . 37
Denis's Valet. (By permission of Messrs
Smith, Elder &^ Co.) . . . . 41
Girl and Vase. (By permission of Messrs
Smith, Elder 6^ Co.) . . . . 45
Boy and Grave. (By permission oj Mr
Somerset Beaumont) .... 49
Reine and Dick. (By permission oJ Messrs
Smith, Elder &^ Co.) . . . . 53
Strange Faces. From a Photograph . . 59
V
320289
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
^* The Young 'Ooman who broke my Flute^
AND SAID SHE didn't." {By permissiou
of J. G. Marks, Esq.) . . . . Q6
Philip in Church. Owner — Lady Tate . 69
Receiving a Medal. {By permission oj J. G.
Marks, Esq.) 73
Autumn. Owner — Sir William Agnew. {By
permission of Messrs Thos. Agnew S) Son,
proprietors of the copyright) ... 79
^^ Andante and Rondo a la Polka." {By
permission of J. G. Marks, Esq.) . . 83
Wayfarers. Owner — Sir William Agnew.
{By permission of Messrs Thos. Agnew 6^
Sons , proprietors of the copyright) . . 87
KuHLAu (Flute Duet). {By jjermission of
J. G. Marks, Esq.) .... 91
Bathers. Owner — Sir Cuthbert Quilter.
{By permission of Messrs Thos. Agnew
&; Sons, proprietors of the copyinght . . 95
AFaiting for Papa. {By permission of Messrs
Smith, Elder &^ Co.) Known in the
water - colour version^ now belonging
to Lady Tate^ as ^'^The Chaplain's
Daughter" 101
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Vagrants (Tate Gallery). {By perynissioii of
Messi's Thos. Agnew &^ Sons, proprietors
of the copyright) . . . . .105
On Board the S.S. Kedar. {By permission
of J. G. Marks, Esq.) .... 109
The Street^ Cookham. {By permission of
S. G. Hoi/and, Esq.) .... 113
The Fates (Woodcut). {By permission of
Messrs Smith, Elder S) Co.) . . .118
The Fates (Water-Colour). {By permission
of Mrs Murray Smith) . . . . 119
The Spring of Life (also known as ^^ In an
Orchard"). {By permission of J. P.
Heseltine, Esq.) . . . . . 123
Boys and Lamb. From a Photograph . . 129
The Plough. Owner — The Marquis de Misa.
{By permission of Messrs Thos. Agnew 6^
Sons, pi'oprietors of the copyright) . . 137
The Ferry. {By permission ofS. G, Holland,
Esq.) 143
The Rainy Day (South Kensington
Museum) ...... 147
Well-Sinkers. {By permissiori of Sir William
Agnew) 153
vii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
The Old Farm Garden. {By permission of
R. G. Lehmaniij Esq.) .... 157
A Fishmonger's Shop. {By permission of S.
G. Holland, Esq.) 167
The Right of Way (Melbourne National
Gallery) . . . . ' . .175
Captain Jinks of the Selfish and his
Friends enjoying Themselves on the
River. {By permission of Messrs Brad-
bury a7id Aynew) . . . . .179
Frontispiece to '^ A Daughter of Heth."
From a Photograph . . . .185
The Escape. {By permission of W. Dalglish
Bellasis, Esq.) . . . . ,191
Note. — Messrs Macmillan 4" Go. have kindly granted
facilities in the use of various negatives of pictures
reproduced in ''The Life of Frederick Walker" by
J. G. Marks, Esq.
Vlll
I
From the artistic dimness of a childhood
accustomed to hear pictures much talked of
but to see them seldom^ three moments
of vivid pictorial impression stand out. Of
these the latest and infinitely the most agree-
able was that which opened before me a " Corn-
hill Magazine " with an illustration inscribed :
The Two Catherines. It would have been
quite impossible to explain what it was that
appealed to me ; the uplooking face of the
little governess — in which the mysterious
something was concentrated — conformed to
none of my canons of beauty ; the story I had
not read ; the name of the artist it did not
even occur to me to look for. I simply sat
staring with my nose very near to the page,
a short-sighted, inarticulate little person to
whom lines and forms had for the first time
revealed a glimpse of life's underlying mystery
and pathos. Looking back now across years
W^ . I
'. I f/; yl v,pKE?DERfCK WALKER
of picture-seeing and reams of art-criticism the
composition rises fresh upon the memory with
the same haunting charm^ a charm hke that of
certain lyrics and certain melodies^ personal^
individual^ yet with that touch of the universal
in the individual which is the essence of genius.
In that charm with its depths and its limits lie
both the secret of the painter's personality and
the measure of the world's debt to him.
The analysis of the charm^ the comprehen-
sion of the man^ the assessment of the debt^
these are the aims towards which the follow-
ing pages are directed by a writer acutely
sensible of the charm and humbly conscious of
a most inadequate equipment in the matter
of technical knowledge.
Until five years ago there existed no full
biography of the man whom Sir John Millais
deliberately pronounced ^^ the greatest artist of
the century^" and of whom George Mason
declared^ to two ^^ cordially assenting" fellow-
artists^ that " Freddy Walker " was the '^^ big-
gest genius of the present day." Scattered
reminiscences^ some warmly sympathetic^ some
coldly depreciative, yielded contradictory
glimpses of an enigmatic figure^ now slow^
FREDERICK WALKER
silent^ reserved^ indolent to sluggishness and
self-absorbed ; now fiery, eager, emotional,
quiveringly alive to every touch, fevered with
the zeal of work and fevered also with the
zeal of sport. In 1896, however, his brother-
in-law, Mr J. G. Marks, published a stout
volume of " Life and Letters " and the mytho-
logical figure was replaced by a real man. The
larger part of the volume is made up of
Walker's own letters inlaid upon the most
sedulously unobtrusive of backgrounds. Here
at last are all the facts that the world has a
right to know of one of its great men ; and
from these facts, so simply stated, the reader
whom such problems fascinate, may seek to
discover how and why English art blossomed
suddenly under the hands of this keen-eyed
London lad, and what was the secret that
made the touch of his fingers inimitable upon
the brush while it left them but the fingers of
the amateur upon the flute.
Frederick Walker was born in 1840, one of
a numerous, and evidently a delicate, group of
brothers and sisters. His father, a working
jeweller, came of a family marked by an
artistic strain ; while his mother was endowed
3
FREDERICK WALKER
not only with marked depth of feehng and
nobihty of character, but also with fine per-
ceptions and a keen eye for beauty. She was
early widowed, and for some years the family
was chiefly supported by her work as an
embroidress. Frederick Walker's childhood
was that of a town boy attending day-schools
and amusing himself at home with drawing
and with the making of models and machines.
He learned no modern language beyond his
own, and his letters contain few references
to books. On the other hand quotations
occur very aptly in them, and his style of
writing' is rather unusually clear, straight-
forward and vivid. In none of his letters
does he give the impression of hesitating
for lack of the right word. On leaving
school he was put into an architect's office
where an intelligent superior, who liked the
boy, and clearly perceived his true vocation,
rather encouraged than checked the con-
tinual drawing of things unarchitectural. At
sixteen or seventeen he embarked definitely
upon the pursuit of his life, began to draw
by day in the British Museum, and to attend
Mr J. M. Leigh's classes in the evenings.
FREDERICK WALKER
By and by he was admitted to the Royal
Academy schools, and in 1858 became an
apprentice to Mr J. W. Whymper, the wood
engraver, with whom he continued to work
three days a week, for two years.
At some time during his employment with
Mr Whymper, Walker joined the association
of artists and amateurs which was generally
called "The Langham," and of which the
main purpose was study from the life. • This
society had regular evenings for sketching,
a subject being given out at each meeting,
to be drawn in a space of two hours at the
next. Many of the sketches thus made by
Walker are in existence and several are
reproduced in the '^'^ Life." All of them have
the special Walker character ; all are made
of the simplest every-day elements, and in
every one is something of that peculiar com-
bination that arrested my own young eyes
in The Two Catheiines — a revelation of grace
and beauty in the most ordinary scenes of
life and a suggestion of something deeper
underlying them.
The Leigh classes, the Academy schools, and
above all ^'^ The Langham " had brought Walker
FREDERICK WALKER
into immediate contact with other students
and artists^ and his drawings were already
known and appreciated among them at
^'The Langham." ^^ His work/' says Mr
Stacy Marks^i ^' was eagerly looked for at the
hour when all the sketches were gathered and
shown together." And indeed it must have
been a dull critic who did not perceive in
such work as Old Age, The Fireside, and
The Peep-shofv the promise of just that dis-
tinction which Walker was to attain.
By the year I860 his student days may
be considered closed. He appears to have
made in their brief space an almost incredible
advance in knowledge^ insight^ and technical
skill ; but the steps and method of this ad-
vance remain somewhat dark. As he never
communicated in words — perhaps never could
have communicated — his artistic impressions,
and as he persistently destroyed his student
drawings it is impossible to follow the pro-
cesses whereby the clever lad ^^with a taste
for drawing" had become, by the year 1863,
the artist capable of producing Philip in
Church. The word ^^ fitful" is employed of
^ '^ Pen and Pencil Sketches," vol. i. p. 69.
6
FREDERICK WALKER
him as a student ; it is probable enough that
his teachers would have reported him ^Mdle " ;
but doubtless^ like another student also des-
tined to touch the heights in his chosen art^
who ^' all through boyhood and youth . . . was
known and pointed out for the pattern idler/'
he was "always busy on his own private end."
To have had wise^ systematic and thorough
teaching in the technicalities of one's craft is
no doubt an inestimable advantage — how in-
estimable can perhaps be judged only by those
who practise the craft of words, so wholly
untaught in this country aud so sadly uncom-
prehended — - but there are temperaments to
which this royal road is not open ; natures
that must pursue their own aim along their
own path ; and it seems clear that Frederick
Walker's was one of these. He paid, as we
all have to pay, the penalties of his tempera-
ment ; struggled painfully to incarnate his
own inner vision ; tried this way and that way,
often apparently torn by hesitations but always
knowing what he sought ; while other men
worked gaily on from a plain beginning to a
plain ending, undisturbed either by mental
conflicts or by germinating periods of in-
FREDERICK WALKER
activity, and perhaps at odd moments, con-
descendingly deplored to one another the
^'^ idleness" and unsteady ways of work of
their young contemporary. Mr Hodgson ^ says
of him — and with an evident sense of speaking
well within the mark, — ^^nor was he in any
danger from over-industry and application/'
So Trollope in his ^^Life of Thackeray" shows
an amusing conviction that it was really rather
remiss of Thackeray not to sit down every
morning after breakfast and turn out daily a
regular stint of pages. But Walker's ^'^fits
and starts " produced The Harbour of Re-
fuge and The Plough, and Thackeray's im-
methodical pen it was that brought forth
"Esmond" and "Vanity Fair." Regular in-
dustry is no doubt commendable and most
properly to be inculcated by all seniors upon
all juniors, but works of genius are not among
the products that can be turned out upon a
system of assiduous labour for ten hours a day
with a regularly recurring interval on Sunday.
The highest kind of productive power is not in
blossom all the year round ; it is not the in-
dustrious, unwearying Trollopes and Southeys
1 J. E. Hodgson, " Magazine of Art," Sept. 1889.
lo
FREDERICK WALKER
who leave behind them imperishable volumes ;
and in the sister art there is^ as Sir Joshua
Reynolds long ago acutely pointed out^ an
idleness which assuming the specious disguise
of industry^ keeps up a perpetual activity with
the brushy ^^ to evade and shuffle off real labour
— the real labour of thinking." That labour
Walker never evaded. If ever painter mixed
his colours ^'^with brains" it was he. An idea
was never left until he had achieved what he
himself felt to be its fullest expression. Again
and again we find him returning to a theme^
rehandling a subject^ casting aside relentlessly
the strenuous work of days and weeks. It is
said of him — not with complete truth — that he
could not endure the criticisms of others, but
at least he never spared himself his own. To
compare,, for example, his ^^ Cornhill Magazine "
wood-cuts with the water-colour drawings made
from them is to receive an impressive lesson
upon the endless patience, the ceaseless pur-
suing demanded of an artist.
At twenty or thereabouts, then. Walker was
already producing the beautiful ^^ Langham "
sketches and already regarded by those who
knew his work as marked out for future dis-
II
FREDERICK WALKER
tinction. This time of his hfe must surely
have been a happy one ; perhaps indeed, the
next five years were the happiest he ever
spent. Of his many friends the dearest were
under his own roof. His mother and sisters
not only loved him, but also — which is rarer —
loved and understood his work. To himself,
apart from the deep delight of practising a
beloved art, his own visibly rapid progress
must have afforded keen gratification, and an
ever firmer basis for those ambitions which he
freely confessed. His sensitiveness, evidently
always great, was not yet excessive, and he
had all the healthy readiness for fun and
enjoyment that naturally belongs to a quick
and responsive temperament. He was ready
for almost any outdoor sport, ready to dance,
to act a part in a play — or to improvise one,
as when, in the character of Major Walker,
with whitened moustache and eyebrows, he
carried on an impersonation through a whole
evening unsuspected — and ready too to '^ play
ghosts" up and down a staircase with a party
of children.
Du Maurier, summing up alike Walker and
his own fictitious hero in the pages of '^ Trilby,"
12
FREDERICK WALKER
says that ^' both were small and slight though
beautifully made^ with tiny hands and feet ;
always arrayed as the lilies .of the field for all
they spun and toiled so arduously ; both had
regularly featured faces of a noble cast and
most winning character ; both had the best
and simplest manners in the worlds and a way
of getting themselves much and quickly and
permanently liked." The unfinished portrait
reproduced as a frontispiece to the " Life
and Letters" shows the marked breadth
between the brows which so often accom-
panies artistic power^ the direct^ observant^
painter's gaze, and, in the original, the keen
blueness of the eyes ; while an early photo-
graph in fancy dress — probably that of Robes-
pierre— displays a singularly correct and
beautiful line of profile. From these, from
the photograph reprinted in this volume, and
from the many caricature sketches of him-
self which have been preserved, it is possible
to gain a perfectly clear image of the trim
and slender figure, and the young intent face
that was never to undergo the changes of age.
On strangers he produced, especially in
early life, an impression of extreme shyness.
13
FREDERICK WALKER
The words ^^shy" and "nervous" have been
used of him by all but one of those persons
remembering him who have been kind enough
to speak to me of their remembrances. But
shyness does not of necessity imply timidity^
and the adjective "timid" applied to him in
Tom Taylor's excellent prefatory note to the
posthumous exhibition of his works is surely
misplaced. As early as I86I Walker showed
signs of an unostentatious^ but pronounced
and well-justified self-confidence. At no time
does he seem to have had doubts of himself
or apprehensions of failure. And even his
much talked of shyness seems to have been
but superficial^ and to have melted very
quickly in congenial society. Not in all com-
panies did he deserve to be described as
"the most silent man I have ever known."
When he felt himself loved and understood
he seems to have been ready with gay and
quaint speech. One such^ trivial enough^ but
characteristic is recalled by one of his hearers.
Sitting at lunch among a group of children
he greeted a dish of stewed pears with a cry
of " Hurrah " and a declaration that here was
something to quench the fire of his genius.
14
FREDERICK WALKER
^'^ He would talk well/' says Mr Marks, ^^ when
roused or interested^ but seldom about his
art." His one recorded- saying upon this
theme ^^composition is the art of preserving
the accidental look" may serve both to
make us regret that it stands alone, and
to assure us that Walker's aims and ideals,
though unuttered, were perfectly clear and
definite to himself.
The foundations of his character seem to
have been its sincerity and spontaneity; and
human beings in whom these qualities are
well marked are pretty sure to be objects
both of very warm affection and of very
genuine distaste. To some of us they are
the elect, who live at first hand and whose
presence in the world makes the main part
of its sunshine ; to others they appear mere
irritating egoists. The portraits of them
therefore are pretty certain to vary largely.
Thus Walker who is seen in his own letters
as gay, quick, eager, deeply affectionate,
arduously industrious, a good swimmer, a good
rider, and, in the judgment of an Insurance
Company's doctor, a " first-class life " seemed
to Mr J. E. Hodgson, a sluggish idler, of
15
FREDERICK WALKER
morbid and taciturn temper to whom work '
was a Herculean task ; while Mr Claude
Phillips thought him '' mahidif . . . from the
start." We later comers^ denied the test
of personal impression^ may well be content
to accept the verdict of judges as keen as
Thackeray and Du Maurier, and to believe
that the charm radiating from almost every
one of his works belonged not only to the
artist but also to the man.
l6
vSfe
WEEPING CUPID
(^Bi^ permission of Messrs Smith, Elder Isf Co.^
W^
II
The London into which^ forty- two years ago^
Walker made his entrance as a lad of twenty,
was one that differed a good deal from the
world of to-day. As to externals, it was much
smaller, probably much less wealthy, and
certainly, if we may coin a word, far less dis-
pensive. Food, dress and furniture were all
less elaborate and less ostentatious; the measure
of the heiress in fiction was taken rather in
thousands than in tens of thousands ; and the
desire of appearing to spend a large income
had not yet, it would seem, become elevated to
the rank of a paramount social obligation. Con-
temporary society — except perhaps in strictly
aristocratic strata — had little or nothing of
to-day's cosmopolitanism ; foreign politics had
settled into calmness after the agitations of
1848 and the Crimean War ; America and Paris
had not become neighbouring parishes to
England ; and in spite of the Great Exhibition
19
FREDERICK WALKER
of 1851, the large mass of quietly living,
decently educated Londoners remained not
merely insular but provincial. But though
narrower, and perhaps more prejudiced than
those, current to-day, the ideals held by our
parents and grand-parents in the decade from
1850-1860 were in many ways higher and more
dignified. Men were measured less by the
standard of wealth and more by that of
personal character. A life devoted solely to
the pursuit of amusement was considered
unworthy ; to be serious over serious matters
was not to be necessarily regarded as a bore ;
and the word ^^respectable" was still a word
of commendation.
The favourite novels of the period — excellent
evidence of current feeling — were those of
Thackeray, of Dickens, of Trollope, George
Eliot and of Charlotte Bronte ; and of these
authors the first and last were still in some
quarters regarded as rather dangerous and
revolutionary. The earlier novels of Trollope
furnish perhaps the most valuable documents
from which to reconstruct the upper middle-
class life of that day — a life spent amid
domestic appointments that were hideous but
20
FREDERICK WALKER
comfortable^ and in garments that while equally
ugly can hardly have had the compensating
merit of being comfortable. The crinoline^ the
pork-pie hat, the hair net, the elastic-sided
boot and the single button glove prevailed.
It was an era to which charity itself can
hardly deny the epithet '^ dowdy/' yet Walker
paints and draws all these things and they
become graceful parts of a beautiful whole.
In art the pre-Raphaelite movement had
almost run its course. Millais, eleven years
Walker's senior, had been painting since 1849
and was now at the stage of development
marked by the Vale of Rest and the Black
Brunswicker. Mason had another twelve years
to live and was to produce in them most of his
English work. The anecdotic school of Ward
and Frith was flourishing gaily, and in another
direction Hunt was producing his simple single
figures, his groups of fruit and his composi-
tions— at once artless and artificial — which
call the word ^' banal" at once to the mind
and to the lips.
It was in black and white, however, that
English art showed, at the moment, most
vitality, and in black and white Walker first
21
FREDERICK WALKER
displayed unmistakably the characteristics of
his genius and obtained that recognition which
happily came early into his too short life. It
was at about the beginning of I860 that he
became engaged more or less regularly in draw-
ing on wood for illustration. His work appeared
in *^ Once a Week/' in '' Good Words/' and
finally in the ^^Cornhill Magazine." The level
of these illustrations varies very greatly.
Walker's markedly individual temperament
would almost inevitably cause him to find
particular difficulty in drawing to order^ and
although^ in all the instances that I have
looked up^ his drawings stand out plainly
superior to those of other illustrators in the
same periodicals^ yet it cannot be denied that
some among them lack altogether that spark
of life by which the greater number are
illumined. The best are in their own line
quite unsurpassable^ and their charm has been
so felicitously characterised by Mr Comyns
Carr ^ that it seems impossible to avoid repeat-
ing the quotation : '^ . . . the expression of
a childish face, the turn of a head or some
fortunate choice of a gesture which seems new
^ J. Comyns Carr, '^'^ Essays on Art."
22
FREDERICK WALKER
in art though famihar enough in nature —
these are the sUght indications that already
give notice in Walker of a special power of
drawing from reality some secret of beauty
that escapes common observation."
To the end of I860 belongs Walker's
introduction to Thackeray. " The Adventures
of Philip " was about to appear as a serial in the
" Cornhill Magazine/' and its author was desir-
ous of finding some competent person to redraw
the illustrations upon the block from his own
sketches. Mr George Smithy the publisher
of the magazine^ having seen some of Walker's
work^ suggested him to Thackeray as suitable.
At Thackeray's request the young man was
brought early one morning to call upon him
and seems immediately to have produced a
favourable impression. After a little kindly
talk Thackeray^ desirous alike of testing his
visitor's skill and sparing his nervousness^
said that he was about to shave and asked
Walker to draw his back. The drawing thus
made is not the same as that which appears as
an initial letter to one of the " Roundabout
Papers " in the '^ Cornhill Magazine " for Feb-
ruary I86I, and of which Mrs Ritchie writes:
23
FREDERICK WALKER
" It is wonderfully like him — I sometimes think
more like than anything else I have ever seen."
'^ Philip " began to appear, in January I86I
and it is probable, though not certain, that the
illustrations for that month and for February
were Walker's versions of Thackeray's sketches.
This was certainly the case with that for
March. Before the publication of this, how-
ever, Walker had rebelled against the con-
ditions imposed upon him. A letter from
Thackeray dated February 11th, shows that
the artist had declined to work up a couple
of designs "which as you would not do them
I was obliged to confide to an older and I
grieve to own much inferior artist." W^alker
wrote a reply "indicative," as Mr Marks truly
says, " of the struggle between his wish not to
offend one whom he greatly respected and his
feeling of what was due to himself." His
hope, he said, had been to do original work
for the magazine, and what he was asked to
do was distasteful to him. This letter was
followed up by a visit to the publisher in
which he declared point blank that he would
do no more such work : " His friends told
him he could do original work and that he
24
FREDERICK: WALKER
ought to do it and not copy other people's
designs which any fool colild do who could
draw." The readiness with which Thackeray
— generally, says Mr Smith, " very jealous of
any alteration in his sketches " — acceded to
Walker's wishes and consented to act in future
no more than the part of a suggester, shows
not only his quick and cordial recognition of
the young artist's powers but also his equally
quick and generous comprehension of his
junior's character. In the case both of
Thackeray and Thackeray's publisher, Walker
certainly displayed that power which Du
Maurier attributes to him of " getting himself
much and quickly and permanently liked."
A warm attachment arose between the elder
and the younger men of genius ; W^alker was
constantly invited to Thackeray's house and
made known to his friends, by whom, says
Mr Swain, he was "flattered" — an expression
which we will hope somewhat overstates the
kindliness shown him.
In regard to his methods of work Mr Swain,
who engraved much of it, says in the same
article ^ : '^ Walker was one of the first men
1 '' Good Words," 1888.
25
FREDERICK WALKER
to introduce brush work into his drawings on
wood. By using a half dry brush he gave
texture to the Hne he was drawing." Mr
Marks mentions that on his walks he would
'^^ frequently carry with him an unfinished
wood block which he had brought for the
purpose of putting in or noting something he
was in need of at the time. He had a most
inveterate habit of biting his nails and would
stop and stand with his fingers to his mouth
looking intently at anything that struck his
fancy and then perhaps the wood block would
be brought out and some additions made to it^
though as often as not he had taken in all he
wanted in that keen and earnest gaze." More
than one specific instance is noted in which he
worked from some particular object — a clump
of jasmine which he recollected as growing in
Mr Whymper's backyard^ or a spray of bramble,
carefully carried back from Croydon to figure
in The Lost Path. Walker thus combined
the habit of drawing from memory with that
of continual reference to nature ; and seems to
have followed a happy middle course between
that method of invariable drawing from the
actual object which_, while increasing the ac-
26
FREDERICK WALKER
From an Early Photograph
FREDERICK WALKER
curacy and sometimes the subtlety of an
artist's work^ often fails in imparting to it life
and motion ; and that method of happy-go-
lucky drawing from an unspecialised general
remembrance which^ while promoting an air
of action and spontaneity, degenerates in the
long run into exaggeration, emptiness and
mannerism. Like Antaeus the artist weakens
unless he renews his contact with the real
earth, but the contact may be that of the eye
and the mind — not necessarily that of the
pencil.
In regard to the cutting of his work upon
the block Walker was, as might indeed have
been guessed, fastidious and particular over
details, but apparently his own training under
an engraver had taught him the difficulties
of rendering a drawing exactly, and he was
more patient than the members of his family
were always willing to be. Of the many
letters that passed between himself and Mr
Swain concerning the illustrations drawn by
the one and cut by the other, two have been
published, one in the '- Life " (p. 179), where it
furnishes a facsimile of Walker's characteristic
handwriting, perfectly legible, free from super-
29
FREDERICK WALKER
fluous loops and flourishes^ irregular in size
and evidently rapid ; the other in Mr Swain's
article already mentioned. This^ the earlier
of the two^ concerns The Two Catherines and
deals first with " the little governess's head."
'^ The line I have marked in dots to be taken
away_, making the ^ back hair ' more clearly
defined. There was a little dot in front of
her upper lip that I have removed, and the
lines on the throat too dark. The child behind
her has some straggling hair which I have
removed. I have thinned the line of the boy's
cheek which sticks out too much. The hand
of the lady (at the door) on the child's back
has too black a line round it^ and I have
carried some light under the table and
softened the edge of the tablecloth."
Besides his work in I86I and 1862 in the
" Cornhill Magazine/' Walker made in those
years no less than forty-nine drawings for ^^ Once
a Week " and a few for other periodicals,
and in 1862 produced a set of eleven indepen-
dent drawings for Messrs Dalziel, six of which
he afterwards reproduced in water-colour. Two
of these Dalziel illustrations, The Village School
and Autumn, are in the print-room of the British
30
FREDERICK WALKER
Museuin ; and two^ Summer and The Fishmonger,
at South Kensington^ where^ the official cata-
logue affording no clue to the position of the
various works, they are extremely difficult to
find, and where, indeed, after spending three
hours, I failed to discover The Fishmonger at
all.
In these drawings where Walker, no longer
bound down to the exigencies of a story, was
free to choose his own subject, we find him
displaying the characteristic that marks most
of his work — a characteristic difficult to define
in few words, and lying perhaps at the root of
what has been called his classicality. Walker,
it has been said, '^ always painted a story." The
saying is singularly inaccurate, yet a truth lies
behind it. It would be more nearly exact to
say that, left to himself. Walker never painted
a story. What he chose to paint was not
often even so much as an incident, but rather
an emotion, a wave of feeling, a mood. His
pictures present not something happening, but
something felt : in Bathers the elementary
bodily joys of youth, air and water ; in ^/
the Bar the mingled terrors of guilt, remorse
and detection ; and in the two designs for
3'
FREDERICK WALKER
The Unknown Land the whole wonder and
rapture of discovery. Generally — always in
his best work^ and often even in his least
successful — the human mood stands in relief
against a background suggestion of the in-
comprehensible^ the depths^, the vast, mutable,
unchanging life of the world, in which our own
life is but a part. It is because he is painting
not an episode but a phase that his critics
reproach him with want of unity and think
him more successful "when he had but one
thing to say than when he had two or three." ^
That he formulated any such general scheme
is wholly improbable. He was not a philo-
sopher, nor a moraliser ; and the painter's
concern is not w^tli what is felt or what is
meant, but what is shown. With the artist as
with every one of us, some of the things seen
arrest our attention, while some pass us by.
In humanity the aspects that chiefly arrested
Walker's attention were those aspects of form
and face that are drawn out by moods and
especially by moods of tenderness and mystery.
The beauty that mainly appealed to him was a
beauty informed by expression of a mood.
^ W. Armstrong in Nat. Diet. Biog-.
32
FREDERICK WALKER
Now the expression of a mood though transient,
is seldom sudden ; and it is curious to note how
very seldom as he advances in life Walker
paints an action that is not more or less con-
tinuous. He paints, if the French grammar
may be employed to point a simile, not in the
past definite but in the imperfect tense. And
this being also a characteristic, almost indeed a
law, of ancient sculpture, it is natural that even
beholders who are unable to name any single
definite point of resemblance should be aware
of something in Walker's work akin to the
marbles of the Parthenon. The spirit, the way
of beholding things, is curiously akin ; and we
can hardly doubt that his early familiarity with
those works did in some measure teach Walker
to see as he saw. But since he was no imitator
but a genuine artist looking out on a world
quite other than that of Athens, and since the
impulse of the genuine artist is and always must
be to paint not only as he sees but what he
sees, this spirit and this way of beholding
show themselves irradiating the most ordinary
scenes, persons and surroundings. The man
who can see beauty only in the remote, the
romantic and the imaginary — in the unseen,
wf 33
FREDERICK WALKER
in short — is in truth the man who cannot see
beauty at all. Walker saw it everywhere^ in
a mushroom^ a brick wall^ a plume of grass^
in the faces around him^ above all in the faces
of children. Even in the dress of his day —
perhaps the very least picturesque that even
the unpicturesque nineteenth century ever
produced — he was able to discern artistic
possibilities. From the figures in Philip in
Church and from those in Strarige Faces,
a theatrical costumier might almost dress a
comedy of the early sixties. No detail is
shirked^ yet we are not conscious of grotesque-
ness. Some of Millais' illustrations to Trollope
strike the eye as far more old-fashioned.
It is true^ however^ that as Walker ceased
to be engaged upon illustrations and also
perhaps as he passed more and more from
the influence of the pre-Raphaelite movement,
he became disposed to modify and, as it were,
to generalise his costumes. The Girl at a
Stile, the Housewife, and the charming maiden
who knits in the Old Farm Garden, are all
clothed in dresses that bear no stamp of
date.
In 1862, however, this change lay in the
34
FREDERICK WALKER
future^ and Walker was still painting details
as strictly of the period as Philip's egregiously
tall hat and Mrs General Baynes's flounces.
It was in the latter part of this year that
the first of his illustrations to one of Miss
Thackeray's stories was published. From
this time until 1 870 he continued to illustrate
all her stories,, and in doing so produced his
very finest black and white work. There
is a marked affinity of spirit and treatment
between the writing of the one and the
drawing of the other of these two young
contemporaries. In each a singular grace
and refinement of presentation devotes itself
with unswerving fidelity to the ordinary facts
of contemporary life ; in each poetic charm is
the outcome of a noble and very simple point
of view that is not covered precisely by any
of to-day's catchwords and does not seem to
be represented by any specific current in con-
temporary literature or art. In what degree
this spirit was that of their time or in what
degree each may have owed it to the influence
of a parent of unusual fineness of character
can perhaps be determined only by such
survivors from that period as retain enough
35 ,/
FREDERICK WALKER
of youth's hope and faith to be fair judges
of this. That the harmony of aim and achieve-
ment was felt both by author and artist is
shown on the one hand by Mrs Richmond
Ritchie's dehghtful httle note of reminiscences
in the '^ Life " (pp. 95-^6), and on the other
by the fact that Walker continued to illustrate
her work after he had practically given up doing
so for other writers. His very last magazine
illustration is that to her story '^'^ Sola " ; and
to this drawings a reproduction of which^ in
water-colour^ is in the possession of Sir John
Aird^ an adventitious interest attaches from
the circumstance that the younger man would
appear to be a very recognisable portrait of
Walker's brother - in - law and faithful bio-
grapher. That the artist himself was satis-
fied with these drawings we may presume
from the fact that he reproduced so large a
proportion of them in water-colours. Two,
from '^'^ Jack the Giant- Killer " — Waiting for
Papa (afterwards called The Chaplain s
Daughter) and The Fates — are among his
very finest works in that medium. Four at
least were made from "The Village on the
Cliff/' and one of these, The Tnm Catherines,
4 4- MADDOX STHHETV/'
-r-ir /ly/2.Ay
INVITATION CARD— MORAY MINSTRELS,
1871
FREDERICK WALKER
sometimes called The Governess, is at the
moment of writing hanging on a screen in
Messrs Agnew's Bond Street rooms^ where,
though very small and not brilliantly successful
in colour, it arrests the eye at once.
By 1 864, or so, Walker, who had in the
interim been painting industriously in oils
as well as in water-colour and had exhibited
his first Academy picture, had become im-
patient of giving his time to illustrations. He
seems to have undertaken pretty willingly
those for Thackeray's unfinished ^^ Denis Duval,"
but to have become restive under those for
Mrs Hemy Wood's ^^ Oswald Cray," then running
as a serial in " Good Words." Early in the year
he wrote : ^ ^^ I begin to think it was a mistake
to take those ^ Good Words ' things and the
beastliness of wood drawing is full upon me —
support me in the resolution to take no more
as these things get finished. I am utterly
tired of it — yes utterly." Nor did he appar-
ently content himself with merely resolving
to do no more, for a little later comes this : ^^ I
asked Swain if he thought I could get off doing
any more ^ Good Words ' drawings — in fact
1 '' Life," p. 47.
39
FREDERICK WALKER
give 'em to someone else. He seemed shut
up and said he thought not. Strahan's ^ away
— at Jerusalem — for three months^ so I must
bear that burden."
It seems to be a general opinion that the
"Denis Duval" drawings are not completely
successful. Their total number (including
chapter headings) is six^ and of these one^
Little Denis dances and sings before the navy
gentlemen, was a re-drawing from a sketch by
Thackeray and does not bear Walker's signa-
ture. It is a little unfortunate therefore that
it should have been chosen for reproduction
in the "Portfolio." Mr Phillips thinks that in
these drawings Walker was " evidently much
less at ease/' that he was "hampered" by
the unfamiliar costume^ that the work is "not
quite simple/' "just a little too contourne both
in conception and style/' and that "there is
something forced^ something approaching
mannerism and sentimentality even in the
prettiest of these drawings." The criticism
seems to apply singularly ill to two of the
drawings : Evidence for the Defence, and
the exquisite little chapter heading of Agnes
1 Mr Strahan was the publisher of " Good Words."
40
DENIS'S VALET
(^Bj/ permission of Messrs Smith, Elder Xd" Co.^
FREDERICK WALKER
slipping a note into a large china jar.
Anything more direct and simple, less self-
conscious, especially less conscious of their
clothes, than the two little lads with the pistol
it is difficult to imagine. But looking at the
whole five, one is aware of something in most
of them a little different from Walker's usual
style, and the difference is not in anything so
superficial as the dress. I believe it to lie in
the fact that they mainly present acts rather
than states of feeling. Under a semblance of
superior unity they have lost that harmony
which is the real Walker characteristic. They
remain fine work, but they might be the fine
work of another man. One would expect to
find them preferred by persons who are not
ardent W^alker lovers.
The end of the year 1864 may be taken as
marking practically the close of Walker's
career as an illustrator. In the four years of
that career he had come to the first rank
in black and white, and the first rank in those
days was a high one. His work, even at
a very early date, had been distinguished ; it
rapidly became masterly, and at every stage it
was original, sincere, absolutely first-hand.
43
FREDERICK WALKER
He was always in pursuit of something ahead,
always trying a better way, never content
merely to do the same as last time. An
illustration to Miss Thackeray's '' Red Riding
Hood/' for instance, shows him departing
suddenly, when at the very summit of his
skill, from the fully shaded drawings hitherto
so successful, and using in considerable parts
of this cut hardly more than a well defined
outline. For a, moment one might doubt
whether this were indeed his work, but the
figure of the little heroine assures us. Only
Walker could have drawn that face, and
that pose, so absolutely ordinary, yet so
singularly distinguished and poetic. This
drawing, though not one of his very best,
displays another of Walker's special gifts —
the gift of imparting nationality to his figures.
Remi is as French as any Frenchman of Du
Maurier himself — as French as the boy and
the fisherman of the 1866 water-colour are
Scotch.
Thus by the end of 1864, when he was not
yet twenty-five years old. Walker had already
made for himself, in black and white, a
reputation which would have sufficed, had he
44
GIRL AND VASE
(^Bij permission of Messrs Smith, Elder Iff Co.)
FREDERICK WALKER
done no more^ to keep his name alive. In the
ten years before his death he was yet to
achieve equal fame in two other departments,
as a painter in water-colours and as a painter
in oils.
47
Ill
In 1863 the Walker family^ resident for some
years previously in Charles Street^ Manchester
Square^ removed to 3 St Petersbiirgh Place_,
Bays water, the home of Walker's remaining
years. The house^ which is but a few steps
from Bayswater Road^ has been a good deal
altered. In Walker's life-time there was no
bay window in fronts but a verandah and
balcony — probably after the pattern of those
still visible six or eight doors higher up. The
studio built at the end of the garden in 1865
no longer exists^ and though this part of St
Petersburg!! Place is probably but little
changed^ the immediate neighbourhood is
being transformed. Vast red blocks of flats
have sprung up^ poor streets have been swept
away^ and the peaceful southern end of "the
Burgh/' as Walker used to call it^ lies, a little,
drowsy, gently old-fashioned nook, very
agreeably restful but not, it may be feared,
48
Vfd
BOY AND GRAVE
( Bi^ permission of Afr Somerset Beaumont^
FREDERICK WALKER
destined to long continuance amid these
aggressive modern developments. The house
seems to have escaped the attention of the
society that affixes to so many London houses
an announcement that some more or less
illustrious inhabitant once dwelt within^ for its
face bears no such indication.
The home circle of which Walker was
eventually^ and probably very early, the central
figure, did not remain a large one. Of his
three sisters, one was married about I860, and
the youngest, so often his model, in the first
days of 1864; of his surviving brothers, one
died suddenly in 1866, and the youngest slowly,
of consumption in 1868. The trio remaining
consisted of his mother, himself, and his elder
sister, Fanny, together with the often offending,
often threatened, and always pardoned cat.
Eel-eye, who began life by sitting for the black
kitten in Millais' Flood, spent his best years
killing birds in the St Petersburg Place garden,
and outliving all the household, finally died
under Mr Marks' s roof. Eel-eye was well-
known to Walker's friends and is frequently
mentioned in his master's letters, generally, I
regret to say, in connection with some deed of
51
FREDERICK WALKER
rapine or murder. Walker^ like Whittington^
Dr Johnson^ and many another intelligent and
distinguished person^ was a cat-lover and was
beloved in return. Mr G. D. Leslie^ in '^ Our
River/' remarks that^ like Landseer^ "he
appeared to understand their language/' and
relates how a bet was made by Mr Stacy Marks
that Walker would not retain a certain cat on
his knees for half an hour without holding it.
'^^ The cat in question was a large tom^ and in
general would suffer no one to nurse him at all.
It was most curious to watch how Walker went
to work. He gradually attracted the cat to-
wards him by a variety of little caresses and
words^ giving it gentle touches every now and
then ; confidence was at last gained and he
lifted it occasionally off the ground^ replacing
it tenderly directly ; finally he raised it quietly
on to his knees^ and after soothing it for a few
minutes withdrew his hands. The time was
noted, the cat subsided into a steady doze and
Walker won his bet with great applause, amid
which the cat disappeared from the room with
alarm."
Of W^alker's domestic life it may be said with
conviction that he was profoundly attached to
52
REINE AND DICK
{By permission of Messrs Smithy Elder Id' Co.)
FREDERICK WALKER
his home^ his mother, brother and sisters, that
he appreciated to the full their admirable
qualities, rested with amplest trust upon their
affection, and was incapable of grudging them
anything that might be won for them by his
exertions. In absence, he was pathetically
homesick ; one of the closest of his friends
writes : '' It is doubtful whether his death was
not due as much to the fearful depression of
spirits under which he laboured after his
mother's death as to his disease " ^ ; and
when death had taken him in turn, his
sister was quick to follow. Many and many
a letter between the mother and son in par-
ticular show how warm was the affection
subsisting between them and how deep the
sense on each part of the other's tenderness
and care. Yet life in St Petersburgh Place
did not always flow smoothly. It is clear
enough that neither Walker nor his sister was
endowed with a temper of patience and
placidity, and that he — as indeed any observer
of his artistic progress would have presupposed
— was liable to those alternations of extreme
1 Mr J. W. North— quoted in ^^Good Words,"
1888, p. 817.
ss
FREDERICK WALKER
elation and irritable depression which^ except
perhaps in persons of exceedingly robust
physique, are apt to accompany and follow
periods of strong creative activity. That
"serenity/' "placidity/' and "imperturba-
bility" of which his acquaintance Mr J. E.
Hodgson deplored the lack, are not concomit-
ants of the temperament that produces such
work as Walker's. The very sensitiveness
of nerve that made him susceptible of im-
pressions so exquisitely fine made him also
impatient over trifles, impulsive, disposed to
sudden changes of plan and sudden bursts
of irritability. The temper of the carthorse
and the attributes of the racehorse are not to
be found combined in the same organisation.
But such faults as Walker's, though apt to loom
large to the unaccustomed onlooker, are not,
when they merely lie on the surface of a nature
fundamentally tender, vivid and generous,
faults that alienate love. To Mr Leslie, who
clearly was himself much attached to Walker
and very sensible of his personal charm, he
seemed habitually inconsiderate of his mother
and sister, not " appearing in the least conscious
when he gave any extra trouble," and "in-
56
FREDERICK WALKER
tolerant of any blunders' or mistakes that
might chance to occur." But an apparent
carelessness of outward forms of consideration
between persons closely connected^ though
always ungraceful^ is not always the sign that
real consideration is wanting ; and indeed a
very punctilious regard for such forms is seldom
found co-existing in England with perfect ease
and intimacy. Walker's letters — to which^ of
course, Mr Leslie had not access — show that
he did fully appreciate the many services
which his family were so eager to render and
he so ready, in fullest assurance of their good-
will, to ask. Moreover, there are two points
to be considered in this relation : the first,
that Walker was, after all, the financial sup-
port of the household, the prosperity of which
depended upon his work and was promoted
by anything that helped his efficiency or
lightened his tasks ; the second, that all these
ministrations, this seeking of colours, inter-
viewing of buyers, arranging of costumes, dis-
patching of parcels, etc., were not merely
personal to the son, brother and bread-winner,
but were performed in the larger service of art,
to which his kindred were no less willing
57'
FREDERICK WALKER
devotees than he^ and in which he himself was^
when all is said^ the most indefatigable toiler.
To them^ as to him^ no sacrifice in that cause
was too great. They, at leasts understood to
the full his aims^ his labours and his achieve-
ments^ and founds we may be very sure, an
ample reward in his success. No doubt, too,
they knew how vital a necessity to him was
their sympathy and comprehension. From
them his canvases were not hidden ; to their
judgments his ears were open ; to them he
wrote in absence with a fulness which often
makes it possible to follow every day and
almost every hour of his life.
Long before ceasing to work in black and
white, Walker had begun painting in water-
colours. " His first important composition
in that medium — Strange Faces — was exe-
cuted," says Mr Marks, ^'^ towards the end of
1862." In the uncompromising portraiture of
the hideously monotonous carpet and wall paper,
in the carefully rendered detail of the clothes,
may be traced the influence of the pre-
Raphaelites, but the little group of the woman
and child is Walker's own. Even in the
reproduction one feels the delicate colouring,
58
u
<
O
I-H
FREDERICK WALKER
and the subtle^ unexaggerated expression of
the child's face ; while the face of the woman
— his eldest sister — is bent in that pose which
he drew so often and in which the line of the
brows runs upward and outward. The same
view of the face is shown by the old woman
in The Harbour of Refuge, by Philip in Philip
in Church, by the mother in Vagrants, and by
many another face in Walker's work. It is
a view that brings out very advantageously
the fine moulding of brow so well marked in
his own face and probably also in the faces
of two at least of his sisters. The hands in
this early drawings as in so many later ones^ are
particularly delicate and beautiful ; in this de-
tail, also, Walker seems to have been fortunate
in his nearest and most willing models.
Of the execution and colouring of Strange
Faces I am not able to speak. A drawing of
I860, The Anglers Return, already displays
much of Walker's later methods, and is so
devoid of the usual thinness of water-colour
that it might at first sight pass for a sketch in
oils. In colour it is a little cold and in tone
much lower than most of his later water-
colours. This subject had already been that
61
FREDERICK WALKER
of "Langham" sketch (reproduced on p. l6 of
the " Life ") and it is interesting to compare
the varying treatment of the group. In the
earher the figures of the woman and girl^
though full of subtlety, significance and feel-
ing, will hardly bear careful examination ;
they are rather indicated than drawn. In
the second rendering the persons have been
separated a little, the figures are more solid,
more correct, and more highly individualised,
and the management of the light is at once
more effective and more exact. But some-
thing has been lost; the tenderness, the
poetical touch of the first sketch has faded a
little. The woman, wonderfully life-like, is
genuinely ugly and — a very rare thing in
Walker's work — strikes one as belonging to
an old-fashioned, almost an extinct type.
Here and in a very few other works of
his earlier day — a sketch called Fright, for
instance, and a couple of caricatures reproduced
in Stacy Mark's '^ Pen and Pencil Sketches " —
may be traced a streak of realism uncompro-
mising almost to cruelty, an insistence upon
the grotesque and ungainly, suggestive of the
work of Cruikshank. It is strange indeed
62
FREDERICK WALKER
to reflect that there was a moment in Walker's
career when he showed tokens of almost sordid
satire^ and that at least one female figure from
his hand might very plausibly be attributed
to the ironic pencil of Mr Phil May. The
ungentle touch disappears very early — dis-
appears^ as some critics think, too completely.
The habit of caricature indeed remained with
him his life long, but, after these early years,
only one instance occurs in which the cari-
cature can be stigmatised as a little unkind
— and that under great provocation : The
young 'ooman rvho broke my flute — and said
she didnt} Some trace, though but a slight
one, of this hard view of the world lingers in
a drawing made for Mr George Smith in 1863,
and intended as an illustration for Jane Eyre.
Both in design and in colour this drawing is
of particular interest, and furnishes a sort of
landmark from which the artist's later pro-
gress may be measured. Nothing is more
clearly marked as he advances in life than his
growing preference for warm tints of colour.
Schemes of brown, red and yellow are common
with him, and Ruskin's reproach that he does
^ See page Q6.
63
FREDERICK WALKER
not paint blue skies is not altogether without
foundation. That chord of green and blue
which predominates in so many English land-
scapes and furnishes so frequent a pitfall for
the English amateur^ seems never greatly to
have attracted Walker. It is curious indeed
to note how^ seldom^ after his earlier years^ he
paints any prominent tree in full leaf. The
tree in bloom and the tree bare of leaf he
rendered with a happy perfection that has left
a whole generation endowed with new percep-
tion of their beauties ; but the tree as the
ordinary man thinks of it^ green as a cabbage^
seldom grows in his enchanted gardens. A
great discretion in the use of green^ a marked
absence of that thick and heavy ^^ chrome " tint
freely employed by many French painters^ may
be traced in his maturer work. But in 1863^
when he made the drawing in question^ this
colour still held a place on his palette and was
used for the mass of ivy that tops the old wall
beneath which Rochester and Jane are sitting.
The treatment of the wall is curious and in-
teresting. The representation of old red brick-
work was a field in which the mature Walker
shone supreme. Indeed we may fairly guess
64
'THE YOUNG 'OOMAN WHO BROKE MY FLUTE,
AND SAID SHE DIDN'T"
we
FREDERICK WALKER
that any person going about to manufacture a
spurious "Walker" would put into it an old
wall and a blossoming tree. But the wall of
Rochester's garden is rather cold than warm ; a
tone of greyish lilac pervades it, the somewhat
uniform green of the ivy runs above, and in
front are the black and grey of Rochester's
coat and Jane's dress — a grey not brownish or
mouse-coloured but rather slaty in hue. In
this part of the drawing indeed it is difficult
to recognise anything especially characteristic
of the later and better known Walker. Often,
in looking at Pin well's work, one is led to
think of Walker ; here, for once, in looking
at Walker's, one thinks of Pin well. But as
we turn to the right-hand corner where the
little Adele stoops for her shuttlecock, like-
nesses to Pinwell, or indeed, as Mr Phillips
suggests in the case of another early draw-
ing, to Birket Foster, vanish. The attitude,
perfectly true but carefully selected, the
drawing of the figure, at once masterly and
graceful, the frock, elaborately faithful to a
passing mode and yet permanently harmonious,
these are Walker's and Walker's only. As an
illustration of the story the drawing was not
• 67
FREDERICK WALKER
successful and the entries quoted by Mr Marks
from Walker's diary show the artist to have
been fully sensible of the fact.
In the latter part of 1863 Walker began his
water-colour rendering of Philip in Church.
Of the merits of this drawing it is difficult to
speak in measured terms. It is a work that
sets its author indisputably in the highest
rank. Had he left nothing else behind him^,
this must have stamped Walker as a great
painter. Reproductions have been numerous
and sometimes very good — that in the '^ Port-
folio " especially — but no reproduction can give
any adequate notion of the strength^ the
solidity^ the depth and luminosity of the
colouring. When I last saw it^ it was placed
almost in direct contact with one of Sir
Laurence Alma-Tadema's brilliant studies of
blue sky and white marble. Yet it was not the
water-colour that paled in the juxtaposition.
Nor is it colour only that is lost in repro-
duction ; mere black and white can convey
neither the exquisite gradations of tone nor
the extraordinary subtlety of expression of the
children's faces. Of the alteration in the
position of Philip's head (mentioned on p. 42
68
PHILIP IN CHURCH
Owner — Lady Tate
FREDERICK WALKER
of the '^^ Life "), Sir Jolin Millais was fond of
relating the details. Inspecting the drawing
while it was in progress^ he pointed out to the
artist that Philip was described as being six
feet in height and that the head of a man of
that stature would come higher up than it was
represented. To his horror^ Walker^ taking
up a pair of scissors^ cut the head of Philip
then and there out of the paper^ and sub-
sequently replaced it higher up in its present
position. Close inspection still reveals traces
of this surgical operation. It is pleasant to
know that this, one of her son's very finest
works, contains a memorial of Mrs Walker, of
whom ^' a. very recognisable likeness," says Mr
Marks, ^'^is to be found in the face of the
elderly lady in a light bonnet seen in the
background, below the base of the pillar."
The young man behind her has been some-
times taken for a portrait of the artist himself,
but was in fact drawn from one of his brothers.
In execution, Philip in Church shows not
merely an advance upon the Jane Eyre
drawing, but a complete change of method.
The earlier work is a little thin and is very
highly stippled ; the later, though luminous to
71
FREDERICK WALKER
an amazing degree and though never losing
the transparency of water-colour^ has all the
solidity and depth of an oil picture.^ ^^ His
results/' says Mr Phillips^^ a ^ere obtained
by a lavish use of opaque pigment^ the high
finish of every part, in which there was nothing
perfunctory or ^niggling,' being due to a
juxtaposition of the minutest touches." This
method was regarded in some quarters as ex-
tremely heterodox. Ruskin, in his letter about
the posthumous Walker exhibition, denounced
it vehemently. ^' The laws of all good painting
having been long ago determined by absolute
masters . . . here is Mr Walker refusing to
learn anything from any of these schools or
masters but inventing a semi - miniature,
quarter fresco, quarter wash manner of his
own . . . which betrays his genius into
perpetual experiment instead of achievement."
Yet surely in art, no less than in other
human affairs, '^'^ perpetual experiment" is the
^ Though this drawing obtained a medal at the
Paris exhibition Walker did not receive the medal
personally, so that his delightful caricature remains
a work of pure imagination.
2 ^^ Portfolio," p. 28.
72
RECEIVING A MEDAL
FREDERICK WALKER
condition of all advance^ and the sort of
"achievement" which is' repeated without
fresh experiments is but stagnation. The
critic who believes and declares that all has
been learned already and that nothing remains
but to repeat the lesson can be of no possible
help to the artists of his own generation. To
the public he may indeed still serve as a useful
check upon that pursuit of the merely new
which is ever the temptation of the under-
educated and also of the over-educated. But
to the worker in art^ the would-be creator^
such criticism as this of Ruskin's can but cause
hindrance and confusion. Eveiy instinct of
the true artist cries out against its falsehood ;
repelled and disgusted he falls into that mood
of scorn for every external judgment which for
him of all men is so dangerous. The sense of
being misunderstood drives him into isolation
and bitterness^ into little mutual admiration
cliques and schools of rebellious exaggeration.
By the time that Ruskin's captious words were
penned^ Walker lay safely beyond them in
his grave at Cookham ; but it was probably
by similar utterances no less than by too
flattering imitations — often like other flattery
75
FREDERICK WALKER
extremely painful to the flattered — that he
was driven to the "touchiness/' the ex-
aggerated reticence and the recoiling from
almost all discussion of his work that marked
his later years.
How refreshing to turn from Ruskin's con-
demnatory theoretics to the simple practical
note of a fellow- worker ! " The uncertain
character of the paper led Walker/' says Mr
Norths "into excessive use of Chinese white
in his earlier water-colours. This use of white
he gradually diminished until in some of his
later work in water-colours there is scarcely
a tracC;, and that existing only because of some
defect in the paper." ^
Walker's own consciousness of his "sins"
in regard to this employment of white is
amusingly shown in one of his many carica-
tures of himself^ drawn about 1865.'-^ He is
represented painfully embracing a "double-
tube " of flake white almost as large as himself
and compelling it to exude in vast serpentine
coils upon his palette. Beneath is the legend :
" What would ' the Society ' say if it could
only see me .^"
1 '' Life/' p. 169. 2 See p. 37.
76
FREDERICK WALKER
^" The Society/' that is the Society of
Painters in Water - Colours^ more generally
known as the ^^ Old Water-Colour Society/'
said nothing unkind to Philip or to the two
other drawings — Refreshment and the scene
from ^^Jane Eyre" — which in accordance
with the rules he submitted on becomings
in January 1864^ a candidate for member-
ship. He showed Philip when completed to
William Hunt^ who " seemed greatly pleased
with it and gratified me very much." Hunt
died shortly afterwards^ and Walker in writ-
ing sympathetically of his death, adds : ^^ I
feel great pleasure in knowing that one of the
last things Mr Hunt did, was to send his vote
for me." Walker was elected an associate of
the Water-Colour Society by a unanimous vote,
an honour very unusual and probably never
received by any other man at his age. The
new associate was represented at the Society's
summer exhibition by the three drawings
named above and by Spring, which had
already been purchased by Sir William (then
Mr) Agnew, in whose possession it now is and
who considers it one of the finest, if not indeed
the very finest, drawing that Walker ever made.
77
FREDERICK WALKER
Of all his drawings it is perhaps the one which
black and white is most hopelessly inadequate
to render. The design^ the charming slender-
ness of the fine budding twigs, the primrose-
stars, all the beauties of line and shape indeed
are shown in the etching, the print or the
photograph, but the infinitely delicate tones
of leaf and bud and the tender atmosphere
of spring, moist yet crisp, that broods over
the real work and brings into the nostrils of
the beholder the very scent of pollen and
primroses elude all reproduction.
Walker's work at this exhibition seems to
have been received with a chorus of admiration,
and a silver medal was awarded to him by
the Society for the encouragement of the
Fine Arts. From this time onward he was
recognised as one of the first of English water-
colour painters.
The winter exhibition of the Water-Colour
Society contained two more drawings, one — -of
which I have never seen even a reproduction —
painted from his own garden at St Petersburg!!
Place and representing a postman delivering
a letter; the other, Denis s Falet, a subject
from '^'^ Denis Duval." The main lines of the
78
AUTUMN
(^By permission of Messrs Agneiv^
FREDERICK WALKER
original illustration are pretty closely followed^
but the later version is in every respect an
improvement. The touch of the artificial^
of the '^'^not quite simple/' with which Mr
Phillips reproaches it has disappeared ; the
pathos of the boy's face is subtler and truer,
and the colouring particularly delightful. This
is one of the rare instances in which Walker
uses blue as the leading note of his colour-
scheme. Madame Duval's gown, ribbons and
apron are all in varying tones of blue and
white, the brighter blues tending to the hue
but not to the texture of the turquoise.
Auimnn, the companion drawing to Spring,
though very beautiful and mellow in colour,
is not so wholly successful. The girl, I
am told, is supposed to look out of the
picture upon her lover, the gardener, paying
attentions to a rival. Her expression, indeed,
exactly fits that situation, but Walker, as usual,
has abstained from putting a story into his
drawing, and the spectator may find or not, as
he chooses, anything beyond the mere autumn
pensiveness suggested by the title.
The year 1864 may thus be taken as marking
Walker's achievement of a second reputation,
w/^ 8l
FREDERICK WALKER
He was already known as one of the best of
contemporary artists in black and white ; he
now took his place as one of the best also
among painters in water-colour.
Meanwhile he had already begun to lay
the foundations of a third reputation^ as a
painter in oils.
82
IV
Walker's first exhibited oil paintings The Lost
Path, was hung — very high up — in the Royal
Academy exhibition of 1863. The subject^
a woman with a child in her arms^ pushing
her way through an expanse of snow_, was one
which he had illustrated in " Good Words "
a year earlier. ^'^Snow being/' as Mr Marks
says^ ^^ not as a rule available here in March^
he made use of salt as a substitute." Of this
work Tom Taylor wrote in 1876: ^^I still
remember how deeply it impressed me. ... I
still think it one of his most impressive
pictures." It did not sell during the exhibi-
tion but was purchased soon after its close^
and Walker^ having received the cheque at
Swanage where he was staying^ sends it at
once to his mother : ^^ and the reason I send it
to you^ dear^ is that you should break into it
as soon as you like."
Wayfarers, his next oil picture, was not
85
FREDERICK WALKER
exhibited until three years later^ but in the
interval Walker^ besides producing some of his
best illustrations and several water-colour
drawings^ had been engaged for a good many
months upon Bathers, v^^hich did not appear on
the walls of the Academy until 1867.
A period of sadness and anxiety had come
upon the household. The youngest brother
John, who had, says Mr Marks, '' his share of
the artistic feeling of the family" and had
been apprenticed to a wood-carver, showed,
when about nineteen, serious symptoms of
weakness of the lungs, and was ordered to
pass the winter of 1865-66 out of London.
Thenceforward indeed he seems to have been
seldom able to spend more than a month or so
at a time at home. His mother was generally
with him, and to these separations we owe a
correspondence that shows us very plainly the
two sides of Walker's life : his ceaseless pre-
occupations with w ork and many struggles as an
artist, and his unfailing care and consideration
as a son and brother. There is never a word
of repining at the cost of these* prolonged
absences, but on the contraiy many admoni-
tions to ^'^the poor exiles " to spare no expense.
86
c
FREDERICK WALKER
Nor was his consideration confined to the pro-
vision of money : he writes continually and
cheeringly to his brother ; sends him a set of
prints after Leech ; tells him of likely books
to read ; thinks^ when he is in Paris^ how Jack
would enjoy ^'^much of it"; and when he is
left for a few days in charge at Cookham^
writes full details of the invalid's cough, sleep
and spirits,, and adds : ^' I have just taken him
up a cup of coffee, as I have done the last few
mornings, as I know it is a comforting thing."
That he felt the separation from his mother
severely is plain enough, and the added devo-
tion to his flute indicated in the letters and
caricatures of this period was perhaps partly
an attempt at filling up his loneliness.^ In
Walker's case, as indeed in that of very many
artists, the pictorial gift was accompanied, as
the specific literary gift so seldom seems to be,
by considerable musical talent. He played, it
is agreed, with taste, feeling and delicacy, and
with ^^ particular attention to tone," but not
1 An artist who was acquainted with Walker's
music master assures me of the extraordinary
fidelity . of the likenesses of him drawn by his
pupil.
89
FREDERICK WALKER
perhaps with remarkable power. " He could
hardly ever be persuaded/' says Mr Leslie^ "to
perform before company" because^ like Land-
seer^ he was strongly affected by music and
unwilling to let his emotion be seen. We^ for
whom his cherished flute remains ever inaud-
ible^ may rejoice in the pursuit to which we
owe the delightful "Last Rose of Summer"
on p. 59 of the " Life/' and the flute-duet here
reproduced^ in which one can almost hear Walker
counting to himself his bars of pause.
It was probably at some time shortly before
the actual commencement of work upon Way-
farers that Walker made the etching of the
blind man and boy which Mr Phillips reproduces
in the " Portfolio " and so greatly prefers to
the painting as being "more forcible^ more
masterly in its absolute grasp of nature." Fine
it certainly is^ and not the least of its fine
qualities is the harmony between the bare,
down landscape and the rather stern figures.
But why the old soldier of the picture — a
portrait of an Oxford Street hawker — should be
considered "less probable" or less natural
than the tramp of the etching is a little difficult
to understand. The execution of Wayfarers
90
FREDERICK WALKER
was pretty sharply criticised on its first appear-
ance ; Mr North thinks the reason was that it
was more flowing^ less hard and smooth — in
studio parlance less ^^ tight" than the work of
Gerome^ Meissonier^ Holman Hunt^ or (in his
earlier period) Millais. The beholder whose
eyes are accustomed to mode^'n methods will
look in vain for anything ^'^ spotty and rough/'
'^'^ coarse yet unsubstantial" or '^'^ slovenly " in
the painting of Wayfarers. Its background is
admittedly one of the most successful ever
painted by Walker — so many of whose back-
grounds are triumphs. As to the figures which
are reproached with weakness and senti-
mentality, it may fairly be remarked of them,
as of Denis in Denis s Valet, that they look far
more real and simple in the original than in
any reproduction. Any person familiar with
the work only through even so excellent a
reproduction as that in the ^'^Life" may well
stand amazed before the original as it hangs on
Sir W^illiam Agnew's wall. The poetic charm
of the boy's pale face is precisely the fleeting
charm imparted by the melancholy of twilight.
In another light, in other surroundings, we
should see another boy. But on this road, at
93
FREDERICK WALKER
just this moment of the declining day^ this
was he^ large-eyed^ pale and pensive. As we
look at the picture we feel that sense of
looking into reality which is exactly what we
fail to feel in looking at the reproductions.
Of the vicissitudes undergone by painting
and painter in the production of Bathers a
good many records are preserved. The first
studies indeed were made at Cookham^ and his
family being with him Walker wrote no reports
of his progress. But by and by he desired
another background and a larger canvas. The
background was found near Hurley^ and thither
the canvas was conveyed. To paint from
nature^ in England^ in October and November^
and on a seven- foot caijvas^ is not all joy. '^ My
dear^ it's fetching work — such tramping over
fields with the horrid great canvas — it's all
warped^ having been wetted through once or
twice. I pull up in a boat to the scene of
action^ and then have to take all the things
across a great meadow ; and a mob of long-
faced horses have once or twice become so
excited, rushing about in circles and kicking
each other, then stopping close to look at me,
and I let one come quite close and sniff the
94
■^
^
CO
^^
^
FREDERICK WALKER
canvas. You see as I have to w^rk the com-
position up^ taking a bit here and a bit there^
I have to drag the canvas to all manner of
places^ and nearly put a hole in it getting
it over a hedge this evening." ^ Nor was his
work confined to ^^ putting in." ^^ It's astonish-
ing how much I have rubbed out in order to
keep it simple, for if I don't, I know by bitter
experience how it will be when I get in the
figures. The first two days' work went out at
one lick." ^ Mr North's note, from long
personal observation of Walker's methods, fills
out the hints of such letters. ^^ Walker painted
direct from nature, not from sketches. His
ideal appeared to be to have suggestiveness in
his work ; not by leaving out, but by painting
in, detail, and then partly erasing it. This was
especially noticeable in his water-colour land-
scape work, which frequently passed through
a stage of extreme elaboration of drawing, to
be afterwards carefully worn away, so that
a suggestiveness and softness resulted — not
emptiness, but veiled detail. His knowledge
of nature was sufficient to disgust him with
the ordinary conventions which do duty for
1 '' Life," p. 62. 2 ii Life," p. 64.
w^ 97
FREDERICK WALKER
grasS;, leaves and boughs^, and there is scarcely
an inch of his work that has not been at one
time a careful^ loving study of fact. Every
conscientious landscape painter will recognise
in all Walker's landscapes the clear evidence
of direct work from nature. No trouble was
excessive^ no distance too great^ if through
trouble and travel some part of the picture
might be better done. He never thought '^ he
could do better without nature ' or that
'^ nature put him out.' . . . He was not
content with his work unless it had sugges-
tiveness^ finish and an appearance of ease ; and
to the latter I sorrowfully feel that he gave
rather too much weighty destroying many a
lovely piece of earnest^ sweetest work^ because
it did not appear to have been done without
labour. Probably this excessive sensitiveness
(to what is after all of minor importance) may
have been due to a reaction from the somewhat
unnatural clearness of definition in the early
pictures of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Walker could and did use his left hand equally
with his right and often worked with both
hands on a picture at the same moment ; as
a rule the left hand^ which was the stronger^
98
FREDERICK WALKER
held a knife or razor, the right, the brush. I
think he would have missed his knife or razor
more than his brush had he lost either. . . .
In his oil pictures he used benzine or turpentine
very freely, except with colours or mediums.
He was not fastidious as to appliances ; any-
thing would do for an easel. . . . Painting in
this rough and ready way, with no protection
from wind, it was often more easy to work on
a large canvas with it lying flat on the ground,
and much of The Plough and other big
pictures was painted in this way. With a
dark sealskin cap ; a thick woollen comforter —
his mother's or sister's work ; a thick dark
overcoat ; long, yellow, wash-leather leggings ;
very neat, thick, Bond Street shooting boots ;
painting-cloths sticking out of pockets ; two or
three pet brushes and a great oval wooden
palette in one hand and a common labourer's
rush basket with colours and bottles, brushes
and razors, tumbled in indiscriminately, in the
other; kittle Mr Walker,' as the country
people called him, was a type of energy.
Sometimes I have known him manage to carry
his large canvas on his head at the same time
that his hands were employed as described, on
99
FREDERICK WALKER
occasions when^ after having been kept indoors
by the weather until quite late in the after-
noon^ his usual attendant help chanced to be
momentarily absent." ^
Bathers, delayed by particular malignancy of
climate on the part of a British springs was
exhibited at the Academy in 1867^ when^
however, it was in a much less finished state
than at present. Mr Phillips complains that the
flesh tones "incline too much to a leathery
brownness and that the open air effect of light
playing upon the surface of the nude human
figure is hardly realised." Another critic, Mr
F. G. Stephens,^ considers Bathers, " apart from
its energetic and virile conception and excellent
design, one of the best modern triumphs of
that graceful sort of realism which aims to
succeed in depicting human flesh, or as skilled
critics say, ^the carnations,' from the life,
according to nature and in sunlight. In this
respect no one has succeeded better than this
youth . . . who with exquisite skill and
delicacy of perception, and with indomitable
1 '' Life," p. 168.
2 ^'^ Magazine of Art." Vol. including Nov. '96
to April '97, p. 121-122.
lOO
FREDERICK WALKER
patience to boot^ put his nude models in the
open air when the atmosphere was surcharged
with lights and without sacrificing an iota of
harmony painted what he saw." The two
principal figures^ the '^ youth half kneeling"
and the ^^ erect figure of the nude bather who
stands dreaming a minute as he strips off his
last garment/' seem to Mr Phillips to introduce
^'^an element of studied classicality imported
quand mime into the subject" which ^'^is felt to
be an intrusion" and to have "a too de-
liberately sculptural character." It is curious
to compare with this verdict the opinion of an
intelligent observer familiar with some of the
best of modern landscape paintings but almost
unacquainted with Walker^ before whom I
placed the reproduction given in the "Life."
These two were the very figures instantly
selected with expressions of admiration for
their truth of attitude. " That is exactly how a
boy stands — I have seen that again and again ! "
was the exclamation. Perhaps the familiarity
with the Elgin marbles which is so valuable a
school for all of us may be apt sometimes to
mislead our judgment. These^ after all^ are
but especially beautiful and successful tran-
103
FREDERICK WALKER
scriptions from nature^ and to some of us are so
much more familiar that any other transcription
approaching them in beauty seems to be a
copy rather from them than from the great
original common to both.
Bathers is the most immediately striking^
though not perhaps quite the highest example
of Walker's power of rendering, as few artists
have ever rendered, the poetry of boyhood.
Another pathetic instance is the boy looking
at a grave, of which two versions — neither
quite completed — are in existence. ^ Little
Philip again as he listens half comprehending,
half dreaming, to the service flowing over his
head in church, and the beautiful barefooted
fisher lad of Corriechoillie whose Highland
accent almost sounds in his face, are full of
subtle and tender mystery. Even more re-
markable, however, are the boys in two early
and comparatively little-known water-colours :
The Bouquet and The Drowned Sailor. In the
former a boy and girl are receiving a bunch of
flowers from the ow^ner of a garden. The
shyness, the wondering delight of the small
boy are rendered with a truth and a delicacy
1 See p. 49.
104
FREDERICK WALKER
all Walker's own^ and contrast almost humour-
ously with the critical^ condescending, affable
air of the slightly older girl. In the other
drawing there is a contrast even finer between
the face of the boy looking with '^'^ruth." with
something of terror and something of awe-
stricken curiosity upon the drowned man, and
the face of the old fisherman who is concerned
too, but accepts death and the perils of the
sea as everyday matters — a face that says, with
the grandfather of Peterkin : ^^ But things like
that, we know, must be " —
Of Fagj'ants, which was exhibited a year
later than Bathers, Mr Comyns Carr — one of
the must sympathetic and comprehending of
Walker's critics — writes that "in directness
and simplicity of invention" it "ranks as
perhaps the most masculine of all his con-
ceptions." In charm of colour, however, and
in technical mastery, it falls below Bathers and
Wayfarers, and for that very reason loses far
less in reproduction. In the situation which
it now occupies on the w^alls of the Tate
Gallery, it entirely justifies what Mr North
wrote in November 1893.1 After speaking of
1 '' Magazine of Art."
107
FREDERICK WALKER
the strength and beauty of colour in The
Harbour of Refuge he goes on to say : ^^ I
think the most complete of Walker's oil-paint-
ings^ "Vagrants/' will appear poor and superficial
in this respect." Certain it is Vag)^ants pales
before The Harbour of Refuge — but then so
does almost every other picture in the room.
Mason's inimitable Cast Shoe is perhaps the only
other work near it which fully holds its own.
During these years of work and sorrow that
divided Philip in Church from Vagrants — years
that had seen the death of both his brothers —
Walker's labours had been relieved by various
holidays. He had paid three brief visits to
Paris^ had been twice for some weeks at a
time in Scotland^ and was now about to make
a journey to Italy. Of his French visits very
little of special interest is recorded. His
fellow traveller and fellow artist^ Calderon^
tells us that he showed no sign of being
particularly impressed by any of the pictures
in the Louvre, and that at the Luxembourg
only Jules Breton seemed to engage his
marked attention. At Versailles, however, he
studied David's Coronation of the Empress
Josephine '^ from corner to corner," and
Io8
FREDERICK WALKER
"slipped away" to return to it again. '^^ He
never spoke of the picture afterwards and I
am in doubt to this day as to whether it was
admiration of the grace of the female figures
which bewitched him^ or whether he had a
sudden revelation of the possibilities of the
short- waisted '^ Empire ' dress. He certainly
showed great affection for that costume after-
wards." The '^^ Empire" dresses that appear
in Walker's work^ however^ are of so very
different a stamp from those worn by Josephine
and her ladies^ and Walker himself was so far
less likely to study the matter than the manner
of another man^ that we may perhaps rather
conjecture in David's work some peculiarity
of treatment, colouring, or lighting that fitted
in with his own preoccupations of the
moment.
His Scotch visits produced various water-
colour drawings, among them the FLsherman
and Boy, in which the boy is so marvellously
successful, but in which the head of the man
fails to stand out quite completely from the
beautiful background.
The journey to Venice was the occasion of
the poetic sketch of Gibraltar ('^^ Life," p. 132), of
III
FREDERICK WALKER
the sketch of a dinner on board the Kedar
(see p. 109)j, and of The Gondola, a water-
colour drawing in the possession of the Right
Hon. Joseph Chamberlain (reproduced on p. 141
of the ^'^Life"). Of this drawing some critics
have complained severely, but the reproduc-
tion gives the impression of a work singu-
larly lovely and singularly Italian. Even in
the sepia monochrome, the back view of the
girl with the spotted handkerchief round her
neck seems to glow with colour. But May and
June are hardly the months for Venice, and to
be long away from home suited Walker ill.
He was probably happier painting at Goring
with his mother beside him than amid all the
pictorial and scenic glories of Venice.
During this period of active work in oil-
colour he had produced, besides the water-
colour drawings already mentioned in this
chapter : Evidence for the Defrnce, from
^^ Denis Duval" — a version more satisfying
in its simplicity and sincerity than even the
original woodcut ; The Moss Bank, painted
at Torquay ; The Poultry-yard ; the unfinished
portrait from which is taken the frontispiece
to the ^^ Life " ; The Street, Cookham, whose old
112
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FREDERICK WALKER
walls and white geese are familiar in scores of
reproductions ; The Introduction (p. 28 of
'^ Life '■ ) ; a charming sketch of a lady sewing
by a window ; The Spring of Life (see p. 123) ;
The First Swalhw (p. 129 of '' Life ") ; Boys and
Lamb (p. 129); Stream in Inverness-shire (p. 115
of "Life"); The Violet Field; The Bedroom
Window; Well-sinkers (p. 153); The Fates
(p. 119) and The Chaplains Daughter (see
p. 101)^ both versions of illustrations to Miss
Thackeray's "Jack the Giant-Killer" — all these
in addition to some dozen of his very best
illustrations. Some of these water-colours
demand more than a mere enumeration of their
titles. Of Well-sinkers it is difficult to analyse
the extreme and singularly characteristic charm.
Perhaps even more than the greater pictures^
this drawing furnishes a test of the spectator's
relation to the artist. It is possible greatly to
admire The Harbour of Refuge, Bathers, and
such drawings as The Fishmonger s Shop, Philip
in Church and The Chaplain s Daughter without
feeling that sympathetic thrill of something at
once kindred and universal that will awaken
for one beholder at one man's work and for
another beholder at another's. Those who
115
FREDERICK WALKER
love Well-sinkers at first sight and go on loving
it more and more are true disciples— ^^ sealed
of the tribe."
The Chaplain s Daughter, with its solidity^ its
delicacy^ its high finish yet perfect subordina-
tion of parts, and its characteristic note, spar-
ingly touched, of a particularly beautiful blue,
dark as indigo but translucent, is technically
perhaps one of the painter's very highest
achievements ; but in subtlety of expression
and possibly in its extraordinarily skilful
balance of pale tones of colour The Fates is
finer still.
Reproductions are given here both of
the woodcut and of the water-colour,
and comparison will show a multiplicity of
small changes. Chief among them is the
enlargement of the space beneath, above and
on each side of the figures — to the great
advantage of the background. The persons
in the woodcut do not indeed strike the eye
as crowded, but when we turn to the drawing
how agreeable is the sense of space, how much
more clearly we feel the women placed in a
room instead of on a crowded stage. How
much in particular does the standing figure at
Il6
FREDERICK WALKER
the window gain in firmness and dignity by
being seen entire and a little way into the
picture instead of at the extreme verge. The
stout lady on the sofa has been furnished with
a light coloured bow under her chin ; her dress
has assumed a pattern of wide^ delicately-toned
stripeS;, and there has been a very slight^ but
very valuable change in the position of the
work-basket on her lap. The end of the
basket is no longer covered by her shawl^, her
arm and hand are behind instead of above^ and
the slope of the basket itself, besides facilitat-
ing the required escape of its contents^ marks
the position of the supporting knee and makes
the woman more of a figure and less of a
bundle. The stern central lady has^ in the
interests of colour^ changed her dark bonnet-
strings for light ones^ and the hook of her
parasol — probably in order to come nearer in
shape to a spindle — has given place to the
club-shaped handle that may be remembered
as fashionable about 1870. It is in the fourth
figure^ however^ that of Anne Trevithic, that
the changes are most in number^ tiniest in
detail^ and most significant in the aggregate.
The first point to strike the eye is that the
121
FREDERICK WALKER
trimming on her gown^ which was a black
band with white edges^ is now a black band
with white spots^ and that a line of it now
encircles her neck. The value of the neck-
band is easily seen^ but not so the reason for
the change of pattern. The slightly altered
fall of the skirt is simpler and more definite ; it
marks a movement at once quicker and less
violent ; so does the hand on the sofa^ no
longer so flat. The whole figure bends a shade
less^ the head is a shade less protruded. But it
is in the face that the slight subtle changes are
at once least and greatest^ and here^ alas ! the
reproduction inevitably falls short. One can
see indeed that Anne's expression is less
violent ; but one cannot see its subtlety — the
surprise and vexation^ veiled by a desire to pre-
serve a smooth surface and conceal the real
nature of her trouble. The touch of mystery^
of wonder^ of the largeness of human fate is in
this tiny face. There is no need to know Miss
Thackeray's story — the deepest and strongest
perhaps that she has ever written. Something
deeper stilly the something that lies beneath
and behind all stories is in Walker's drawing.
The Spring of Life, known also as In a7i
122
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■l^HUk'-MiiyHL
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THE SPRING OF LIFE (Also known as "In an Orchard")
( Z?^ permission of J. P. Heseltine, Esq.^
FREDERICK WALKER
Orchard, possesses a charm and tenderness of
feeling recognisable in any reproduction ; but
none comes near to giving the impression of
the real drawing. Not only is the colouring —
full of all the infinitely tender tones of spring
— delightful beyond imagination, but the faces
of the children, especially of the elder, have
tones of colour and delicacies of expression
quite beyond the range of black and white.
The hair, inevitably black and heavy in a
print, is richly brown, the softly receding
planes of cheek and jaw make the face, not,
as in the reproduction, round, but rounded —
which is quite another thing — and the whole
countenance breathes life. You can almost
hear the boy's voice and the lamb's bleat.
The dress of the mother w^hich I — it is im-
possible to tell why — had conceived as blue,
is of a tone between the raspberry and the
mulberry, harmonising as no shade of blue
could ever have done with roof, and wall and
grass. As for the blossoming cherry-tree, no
one who has seen — and who that is English
has not seen — the Harbour of Refuge or the
First Sfvallow will need to be told what Walker
has made of that.
125
FREDERICK WALKER
It is quite characteristic that of this exquisite
drawing as^ later^ of the Old Farm Garden, he
writes as of a trifle. Perhaps he was disposed^
as all of us naturally are, to measure the
importance of his work by the pains it cost
him ; whereas, in creative art, that which
^'^ comes of itself," that which the artist feels
to be created less by himself than by those
" brownies " of whom Stevenson tells us, is
apt to have a grace and perfection beyond the
reach of the most strenuous endeavour. Yet
since it is only the strenuous endeavourer to
whom the ^^ brownies " consent to dictate,
the public is perhaps not so far astray in its
grateful admiration for the artist. If Walker
painted The Sp7ing of Life easily, it was not
solely because nature had given him an admir-
able equipment of eye, hand and temperament ;
but also because for years his eye had received
and compared, his hand practised, and his mind
sedulously considered the materials that life
presented to him.
The thirst of observation, the insatiable
impulse of exercise and practice, are endow-
ments perhaps at least as rare and no less
essential to the artist than the spark of genius.
126
FREDERICK WALKER
Among the would-be artists who crowd our
art schools^ perhaps nearly a third possess
some touch of the essential fire^ and perhaps
an equal proportion the persistent industry^
but small^ indeed^ is the fraction possessing a
combination of both. Without that twofold
possession^ no artist attains the highest rank ;
and Walker's case — whatever Mr Hodgson may
have thought of his industry — is but one more
instance of this truth.
127
In the second half of 1868 Walker's working
life entered upon a new phasex He paid a
visit — largely in the hope of fishing — to his
old friend Mr North in Somersetshire. " I
am here/' he writes to Millais in August^, ^^as
I thought on a "^ flying visit/ but the place
is so completely lovely and there's so much
paintable material that I expect to remain
until quite the end of the month." This
month was but the first of many. The
Somersetshire scenery delighted him^ the
climate^, in spite of dampness^, seemed to
agree with him^ and in Mr North's calm, con-
siderate friendship, and full artistic sympathy
he found a moral atmosphere no less congenial.
The letters give a pleasant picture of the
simple, busy life led by the two friends, lodged
in a beautiful old, more or less decayed, and
now, alas ! modernised house, going off to
work, each in his own way, at the creation
128
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FREDERICK WALKER
of beauty^ returning to the excellent meals
of kind Mrs Thorn e^ "the farmeress/' and
concluding their evenings with " flute^ smoke
and talk." Here^ on this first Somersetshire
visits he began Mushroom Gatherers, a subject
never finished to his mind^ but of which the
study in oils is a fine twilight picture full of
a strange depth and richness of colour to which
reproduction can do no justice ; and painted
the little study of Mushroo7ns and Fungi, which
in its own line has never been surpassed^ and
perhaps never equalled.
Still-life paintings and flower paintings are
often fascinating arrangements of colour and
sometimes marvels of imitative dexterity^ but
it is the rarest thing in the world to find one
of them capable of imparting precisely the
pleasure that would be given by the real
objects arranged with equal skill. Every
lover of natural objects — flowers^ fruits, even
surfaces, metals and textures — knows that to
each belongs a mysterious indefinable charm
of its own, something for which, in the case of
things inanimate, the words "temperament"
and "atmosphere" seem too large, but which
ye I those words come nearest to expressing.
131
FREDERICK WALKER
It would seem that an exact imitation of super-
ficial aspects should^ in the case of lifeless
objects^ inevitably convey these same qualities,
but ninety-nine times out of a hundred — nay,
nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a
thousand — the mysterious something is left
out. In Walker it is present. If a mushroom
could have a soul. Walker might be said to
have painted its soul.
In October, after short visits to Scotland,
and to Freshwater, where he met Tennyson,
who was '^'^most kind," "very jolly," and
"came to see Miss Thackeray and me
and saw my water-colour," he returned to
Somersetshire and began to lay plans for The
Plough and The Old Gate. His letters, save
for complaints of unfavourable weather, are
cheerful and hopeful : " No news. All right
and jolly. Work going on well. Send us
a something to read." Presently, in November,
he is going to have "a shed or hut, built of
boards," to shelter him while he paints "the
background of my great go."
The Old Gate outgrew its first canvas and
was transferred to a larger. The smaller
original canvas— some parts of which Mr
132
FREDERICK WALKER
North considers superior to the second — is now
in the Museum and Art Gallery of Bimiing-
ham. The succeeding spring was spent largely
in struggles with an inimical climate — struggles
from which even a robuster man might wisely
have retreated. In the teeth of wind^ snow
and personal discomfort^ however^ Walker
persevered and The Old Gate was made ready
for this year's exhibition of the Academy. It
is so many years since I saw this picture that
I cannot venture to speak of its colouring ;
and since its design and composition are sub-
jected to precisely the same complaints that
are directed against The Harbour of Refuge, it
may be well to leave their discussion for those
pages which deal with the admittedly greater
picture.
During the summer of 1869,, which was
spent in London and on the Thames, Walker
painted the unfinished Peaceful Thames, upon
which Mr Leslie's "Our River" furnishes an
interesting note : " The method with which
this picture was begun was very curious and
was one he was fond of at that period ; the
whole effect was laid in with the strongest
yellow pigments, aureoline, cadmium, lemon-
133
FREDERICK WALKER
yellow and burnt sienna. ^ So rich was the
effect or ^ fat/ as he called it^ that a touch of
black and white on it looked quite blue by
contrast." After a visit to Scotland^ where he
made, in the garden of the historic seat of
Stobhall, the drawing of a Lady in a Garden,
Perthshire, he returned in the autumn to
Somersetshire in order to resume work on The
Plough. Thence he wrote, in the middle of
November, to his sister Mary, telling her that
his ^' little wood-house " is now provided with a
stove and chimney and that he proposes to
make tea in it. ^' Well, ^this is opposite a
grand old stone quarry, that is wonderful in
the evening light, with trees and a fringe of
green on the top, but all crags and like a cliff;
and descending from it fields with good undu-
lating line, and the place suggests something
quite wild and far away from eveiyone. . . .
" I intend having . . . nearer still, a large
spread of bloomy, newly ploughed earth,
purple, you know, and sparkling and still
in rather a wavy sort of line, and right in
front The Plough in full action, guided by
1 '^ Life," p. 42. Mr Marks conjectures ^^ raw
sienna."
134
FREDERICK WALKER
a strong man. The near horse white in tone
rather with yellowish mane and tail^ telling
against the dense earth just ploughed up ;
and guiding the horses^ with long reins, a
boy, active and graceful if I can do him ;
and indigo rooks circling above — at least
with rather blue lights on them — one just
poised before he drops on a furrow. Some
teasels and large weeds right in the fore-
ground, such as keep their form through the
ploughing months ; the dress of the figures
not suggesting any particular time — not the
present, that is — if I can only do it." ^ Upon
The Plough and some water-colour versions of
previous illustrations — which he denominates
^^pot-boilers" — he worked with very brief
intermissions until time compelled him to
bring the picture, enlarged from its original
dimensions by the assistance of the village
dressmaker, to town, where for a day or two
before the ^^ sending in" he worked from a
white cart-horse standing in the garden of St
Petersburg!! Place. His " wood-house" did not
apparently always serve to shelter him ; Mr
North, in his interesting reminiscences of their
1 '' Life," p. 198.
FREDERICK WALKER
life together^ says : " Walker did not invent
out-of-door paintings but no man more honestly
worked in open air^ more determinedly^ more
appreciatively. I have known him working
under circumstances of physical discomfort
which would have made painting impossible
to most men. On The Plough, for instance^
he worked^ some windy days^ with the canvas
lying on the uneven earthy with great stones
and lumps of wood on its corners to keep it
steady. Once it was carried into the stream
which is its foreground by an extra strong
blasts and floated down some way — luckily
face up. This he took very calmly^ sayings
' I have noticed that unfinished pictures never
come to harm from accidents.' " ^
The Plough was received apparently with
unanimous praise^ and the extracts given by
Mr Marks from the contemporary notices are
indeed amply deserved. To Mr Comyns Carr
the picture appears a perfectly successful
achievement.^ '' As we examine the design,
it seems that to each figure has been assigned
the attitude most enduringly associated with
1 ''^ Magazine of Art/' November 1893.
2 '^^ Essays on Art."
136
Mii^^^Bi^^^^^^^H
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DC
FREDERICK WALKER
the duty to be performed ; the subject has
been watched so long and closely that the
different and changing movements of horses
and men have at last yielded the one fixed
outline that is expressive of them all. ... In
the perfection with which all the figures are
attached to the soil^ in that idyllic grasp of
a scene which locks together in a single image
the landscape and the people who inhabit the
landscape, the work may be reckoned equal,
if not superior, to the work of the French
painter" — that is, of Millet. And now hear
another critic. Mr Claude Phillips, after com-
plaining of a certain want of aerial perspective,
goes on : " Worst of all is the much-vaunted
plough itself, the most misdirected piece of
rustic classicality to be found in any of the
artist's work. The horses may be inspired by
those of the Parthenon, but they are nerveless
and without movement ; the pretty boy who
whips them up and the ploughman himself
may, and do, form charming lines with the
team and the plough, but their movement is
not nature, not even generalised nature with
the unessential omitted. . . . George Mason
. . . would have produced a work more homo-
139
FREDERICK WALKER
geneous^ more complete^ and better digested
from the artistic standpoint ; he would Jiave
seen his subject and continued to see it^ as a
whole predominant over its component parts^
and not to be sacrificed to them. There would
have been in the relation between the figures
and the landscape just that inevitableness^ that
perfect balance which Walker could never
quite command." ^
The design of the picture lies before the
reader^ but gives no idea at all of the colour.
The quarry cliff is of a deep red in the setting
sun ; above it a heavy cloud fills the centre,
resting, with a boldness from which a younger
or less daring artist might have shrunk, on the
highest point of the slope ; the triangles of sky
to right and left are of a deep not very
transparent blue. In the first glance Mr
Phillips's complaint seems justified ; the cloud
looks too solid, the clifl* too near. But it is
ill to question the faithfulness of a transcriber
so scrupulous and so well endowed as Walker.
Careful observation of sunset effects may show
us that precisely this appearance of nearness,
precisely this lack of definition of planes, does
1 '' Portfolio," June 1894.
Uo
FREDERICK WALKER
arise when the Hght of a sinking sun strikes
nearly level upon some hill or cliff against a
cloudy sky. Whether this fact should have
debarred Walker from choosing such a sky we
may of course debate if we will ; but having
once chosen it^ he would have been false to
nature if he had put in^ out of his own head^ that
perspective which nature had for the moment
abolished. In regard to the figures and the
horses this reproduction^ like every other that
I have ever seen^ more or less fails to give their
strenuousness. In the picture one feels the strain
of the ploughman's every muscle_, the tensity of
the boy's stretched arm and leg^ the labouring
pull of the horses' shoulders. The '^ Pall Mall
Gazette's " critic was right enough in using the
words '^'^ epic grandeur "—and yet — something
there is in the picture not entirely satisfying.
After long reflection and very careful detailed
consideration I am inclined to believe that The
Plough suffers from being on too small a scale.
I do not mean that the setting is too large for
the figures^, but that the eye — why^ I cannot
say — craves to have the figures nearer life-size.
That there are subjects which demand treat-
ment on a large scale and subjects whicli
141
FREDERICK WALKER
look the better for being more or less in
miniature^ every painter and every observer of
pictures knows. The Plough I cannot but think
belongs to the former group and would have
gained in power^ in dignity and in beauty had
the canvas been twice as large as it is. Some
dim^ unanalysed feeling of the kind probably
lies at the root of the dissatisfaction with which
some ardent admirers of Walker behold this
particular work. " I love everything he ever
painted — everything except The Plough,'' said a
lady to me the other day. In this connection
it is perhaps significant that Walker's next pic-
ture^ At the Bar, represented a life-sized figure.
^^ Walker's labours on The Plough had left
him/' says his biographer^ '^'^in a low state of
healthy and certainly the way in which he
worked in the open air in all weathers was
calculated to try a much stronger man." We
hear — ominous words — of ^'^a succession of
colds." He made a second visit to Venice^
where he seems to have tried^ in vain^ to
"place" the group of figures with which his
thoughts were busy and which eventually
developed into the Harbour of Refuge. By the
end of July he was back in England and
142
FREDERICK WALKER
staying with his mother and sister on his
beloved Thames at Bisham '^'^just above Great
Marlow." Here he painted The Ferry, perhaps
the most universally beloved of all his water-
colours. Any reader unfamiliar with the
original must bid his imagination bathe the
reproduction in the warmest tones of mellow
reds and browns. At Bisham^ too^ Mr Marks
believes, though at a later time, was made the
water-colour of The Rainy T>ay, called incor-
rectly on its frame at South Kensington, The
Rainy Day, Cookham. Of this, except that the
roadway looks a little too light coloured, the
reproduction gives a very fair idea. The
original at Kensington does not show to full
advantage, partly perhaps owing to the effect
of a gold mount which seems to dull its deli-
cate perfection of colour, and partly no doubt
owing to that juxtaposition of many pictures
which is so trying to all.
To the same period as The Ferry Mr Marks
is disposed to attribute The Amateur, that
delicately humorous drawing of which, under
an appearance of artlessness, both design
and colouring are so daring. A straight
cabbage bed, a straight path, a straight
vjk 145
FREDERICK WALKER
flower bed and a straight paling run parallel
across the main expanse of the paper ; on the
right rise an upright red-brick gatepost and^,
nearer the fronts upright scarlet-runners. A
ball on the post and a segment of wheel seen
through the open gateway relieve the straight
lines. Amid the cabbages stands a coachman^
solidly planted^ considering with pleased
attention the chosen cabbage which he is
about to cut. The colouring — most unusual for
Walker — is almost entirely in tones of green^
and of their skilful gradation no words can
give an adequate impression.
The year 1871^, which was that in which
Walker was elected an Associate of the Royal
Academy^ was marked by the exhibition of
At the Bar. I never had the good fortune
to see this picture^ but judging from a photo-
graph of it in its damaged state, cannot but
believe that it must have been, in some
respects. Walker's very finest work. The
picture consisted of little more than a woman
standing in the dock, apparently at the close of
the day, her face full of suspense and
apprehension ; an usher's head and shoulders
just showed beneath ; a pillar was behind her,
146
>H Ed
FREDERICK WALKER
and a hanging lamp unlighted over her head.
This painting was made at home and the
artist's family entered assiduously into his
labours. His mother '^^ roamed about London "
seeking a lamp of the right sort; his sister
Fanny went to Beaconsfield to inspect a dock
which it was hoped might suit ; his sister Maiy
stood for the face and figure. "^ Their interest
in the picture was^ in fact^ remarkable. It was
almost as if the poor hunted creature portrayed
on the canvas stood before them in very truth.
At night, the forlorn woman in the deserted
studio was spoken of by them in tones subdued
by sympathy. "1 The picture was very low in
tone and looked still more so amid the brilliant
colouring of the Academy walls. Yet many
beholders saw its fine qualities. Mr Comyns
Carr writes of it : '^ In his treatment of the
face Walker here gave evidence of a power of
passionate expression that is not revealed in
any other of his works. . . . Those who
remember the picture as it was first exhibited
and who can recall the desperate and hunted
aspect of the woman's face and her expressive
attitude in the dock, will certainly admit that
^^Life/' p. 221.
H9
FREDERICK WALKER
a painter who could command such intensity of
human feeHng and who could also present the
careless beauty of such a subject as The Bathers
must have been possessed of gifts that had
not yet seen their full development." The
picture's appearance in the exhibition was a
bitter disappointment to the artist. " I have
really been so put down by it/' he writes to Mr
Norths ^^ that I scarcely like to ask you to see it.
I feel that it must^ in effect^ be done again ^
^^His sister Mary/' says Mr Marks^ "on going
into the studio one day found Walker on his
knees with the picture on the floor^ rubbing
down parts of the woman's face and neck with
pumice stone preparatory to repainting them."
Possibly^ however^ he felt that he was not yet
ready to do all that he wished with this
difficult subject and left the idea to mature —
as by this time he must well have known that
ideas did mature — in his mind. At the time
of his death he had not repainted the face^ the
main part of which was still in the ghastly
whiteness of its erased condition. Eventually
the head was repainted at the request of
Walker's trustees and under the advice of a
small body of artists by Mr Macbeth^ whose
150
FREDERICK WALKER
task was assisted by reference to a small study
of the subject exhibited at the Dudley Gallery
in 1872 and again at the posthumous exhibition
in 1876. The restoration cannot be con-
sidered successful ; probably too great care and
anxiety to follow the original destroyed the
restorer's ease and hindered the full exercise
of his powers. To me the photograph with all
its defects — defects which are considered to
render its reproduction here impossible — has^
even at present^ a depth of tragic suggestion
not attained by the restoration^ and by no
means equally present either in the water-
colour study which I have been allowed to see
or in the reproduction given in the ^'^ Life."
Lovers of Walker cannot but feel that the
incompletion oi At the Bar adds a fresh pang
to their regret at his short span of life. So
much of the admiration given to their favourite
artist is^ as they indignantly feel^ bestowed
upon mere '^'^ pleasantness " and takes little
account of the strength and truthfulness that
set him far above the plane of other painters
equally pleasant and sometimes almost equally
accomplished. To see in W^alker nothing but
the domestic idealist^ is as if one should see in
151
FREDERICK WALKER
Tennyson only the author of the " May Queen."
An ^^ agreeable" picture At the Bai' can no
more have been than '^'^ Othello" is an '^'^agree-
able" play; and the average City man would
be no more likely — of spontaneous choice — to
hang the one upon his dining-room wall than
to go forth after his excellent dinner in order
to witness the other. But the ^'^ pleasure"
which is the aim of art^ holds other elements
besides the '^'^ pleasant " and the '^'^ agreeable/'
and there is a beauty of tragedy no less than a
beauty of the pastoral. A '^'^not entirely suc-
cessful experiment" Mr Comyns Carr justly
calls this picture^ but the experiment was in
the direction of Walker's highest successes ;
for here again there is no events no story —
only emotion^ a mood^ a phase of feeling.
The Lost Path which^ by critics who have seen
both pictures^ is apt to be ranked in the same
category^ was less detached from mere circum-
stance^ more dependent upon the material
accidents of snow and darkness^ and by that
very quality nearer to those dangerous paths
of allegory and symbolism which have led so
many an artist away into the wilds.
Failure as he held it to be^ At the Bar, even
152
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J:
"^
FREDERICK WALKER
more surely than The Plough, announces certain
qualities of greatness in Walker's talent.
If his execution^ as an oil-painter^ was not
altogether on the level of his imaginative
power^ we must remember both that he had
not yet completed his thirty-first year and
that one of the conditions of growth is that
^^a man's reach should exceed his grasp."
Sometimes before the idyllic perfection^ the
absolutely sure execution of such water-colours
as The Old Farm Garden and the Fishmonger s
Shop, we are tempted to doubt whether
Walker did not — as some critics are ready
to declare — here touch the highest point
possible to him ; whether the mastery here
displayed be not the utmost limit of his reach.
The wreck of ^^ the Bar remains to reassure us
and to convince our unavailing regret that the
unfulfilled future held an artist even greater
than he who was buried in 1875 at Cookham.
155
VI
From the middle of 1871 to the end of 1872
was a time of mastery and fruition. Hence-
forward no exhibited work could possibly be
considered as a failure^ and if, in comparison
with Walker's own very best productions The
Village and The Right of Way may seem a little
tame^ yet as the work of any new hand they
would justly have been held to betoken the
advent of a serious rival. To the summer of
1871 belong two — probably three — of his
serenest and sunniest water-colours. Of the
beautiful Old Farm Garden Walker himself
writes as ^'^ just a slight thing with a lilac bush "
which he has ^^just sketched in." In its
finished condition it is one of his triumphs^ and
beyond its undeniable charm and beauty^
interesting as an example of successful dealing
with a fairly bright shade of the difficult violet-
lilac-lavender group from which painters in
general hold judiciously aloof. From the re-
156
FREDERICK WALKER
production I had myself unconsciously and as
a matter of course conceived the blossom as
white^ and the real drawing broke on me with
that freshness and surprise which the genuinely
original artist — and he only — reserves for even
the most accustomed of his admirers. The
wall and roofs have^ as usual^ delightful tones
of mellow red^ the bee-hives are touched with
Walker's favourite greenish blue^ and the
flower-border is painted as only Walker paints.
As is so often the case^ the dress is spotted —
Walker, like Mrs Tulliver, ^^ always liked a
spot " — and the cat on the path is rendered
with the fidelity and comprehension that might
be expected from the sympathetic master of
Eel-eye.
To the same period and to the same happy
mood belongs A Girl at a Stile, which might
very well have been made a third to Spring
and Autumn and borne the title Sujnmer. A
girl wearing a dress neither quite brown nor
quite brick-red, leans in the shade of a blue-
green umbrella upon a stile and reads a letter ;
beyond her is blue sky, and each side bushes
of blossoming wild-roses. A bunch of pink
and red roses lies on the step of the stile and
159
FREDERICK WALKER
we may think^ if we please^ that the letter in
her hand lay there with them. The very
spirit of English summer is in this drawing :
the clear pale sky^ the delicate pattern of the
briar leaves against it, the full luxuriance of
grasses and wild flowers about the girl's feet
are all that may be seen from a hundred
field paths any fine day of June, but they are
not quite what Walker was wont to paint.
An earlier or a later season and a later time
of day were generally more attractive to him.
But never did he deal more tenderly or more
faithfully with the features of any landscape.
The Housewife, which I regret that I have not
been able to see, can hardly fail to be equally
delightful. A woman sits, busily shelling
peas, in a backyard where there are flowers in
pots, climbing plants and a water-butt which
we may divine to be of the greenish-blue
displayed by the bee-hives in the old farm
garden and the umbrella over the stile.
In the early part of 1872, and probably
earlier. Walker was working busily upon The
Harbour oj Refuge, and presently was looking
out for a statue of a founder to adorn his
quadrangle. This desideratum he thought he
l6o
FREDERICK WALKER
had discovered in Charles the Second's statue,
then still lingering — though described as long
ago as 1750 as ^*^ wanting to be taken down"
— in Soho Square. The Restoration costume,
however, was superseded by the classic toga
now to be seen in the picture, and the dilapi-
dated monarch, instead of entering on a new
lease of life within the frame of Walker's
masterpiece, retired unrecorded to a country
retreat.
The composition of The Harbour of Refuge
(see frontispiece) must be familiar to almost
all English eyes, and the picture itself, thanks
to the munificence of Sir William Agnew, now
hangs (on walls which the nation owes to another
generous donor) in the Tate Gallery, where
every Londoner and every visitor to London
can see it for himself. Its glow of colour no
words can convey. Its radiance is powerful
enough, as a companion pointed out to me
on an afternoon between Christmas and the
New Year, when just before four o'clock we
glanced once more into the room, to illuminate
the whole gallery in which it hangs, even in
the closing twilight of a December afternoon.
Mr Phillips — who finds none of Walker's oil-
w/ 161
FREDERICK WALKER
paintings really successful — complains that the
work ^'^ lacks unity not less of general impression
than of composition." In like manner he
complains that the component parts of The Old
Gate '^ do not make up a picture in the higher
sense of the word/' that the painter "has not
got his subject together, that it straggles, that
it does not express itself as a whole." Judging
solely by the reproductions, it is certainly true
that The Old Gate does not produce a single
and vivid impression. Reproduction, however,
so often does injustice to Walker, that a view
of the original might greatly raodify our
judgment. The late Tom Taylor, quoted by
Mr Marks,^ speaks of its '^^ powder of arresting
attention, and the art it shows, not of telling a
story, which is common enough, but of setting
those who study it to make a story for them-
selves, which is far rarer." The distinction
is a sound one, but the second quality may
be no more a virtue in a picture than the first,
and in The Old Gate it is not a virtue. It is
the fault of the picture that it does too directly
suggest an episode, that its subject-matter is
rather too much individualised and detailed to
1 '' Life," p. 176.
162
FREDERICK WALKER
be entirely in accord with the artist's genius —
or perhaps with the demands of pictorial art.
Here for once Walker conies near to the danger
whichj as an illustrator^ he knew so well how
to avoids of being anecdotic. A want, not
of unity, but of univ^ersality, is the picture's
weakness. Walker was at his best when he
dealt with feelings common to the general
mass of men — the influences of evening, of
sunshine, of terror, of labour, of youth and of
age. The sentiment of The Old Gate is special-
ised, not general ; it lacks the profundity, the
mysterious suggestiveness that belong, for
example, to The Plough and Wayfarers, and
that must have belonged to At the Bar.
But is this the case with The Harbour of
Refuge } Does any behqlder who is other than
a professional critic really feel a lack of unity
or find the canvas made up of " episodes }'' I
doubt it. The picture, as far as I have been
able to observe its effect on others and on
myself, does not indeed create in the brain a
coherent intellectual conception — that is not
the function of art — but it strikes a clear,
resonant and harmonious note of responsive
feeling. We look at it with that sense of
FREDERICK WALKER
memory^ of recognition^ of a door opened
before us^ which we receive only from fine
works of art or from deep and sudden personal
emotions. That The Old Gate can awaken
that sensation in all its fulness^ seems im-
probable ; that The Harbour of Refuge can
and does^ hundreds of beholders can testify.
Against both pictures is raised the old cry
that certain of the figures are too classical.
Mr Phillips thinks the young workman in the
earlier picture '^'^aggressively Pheidian in its
calculated classic grace/' and the mower of the
later '^ more classical still than the fustianrclad
divinity of The Old Gate, and more self-
conscious in its measured grace." Ruskin^
unmeasured as usual^ speaks of ^^ the ridiculous
mower_, galvanised Elgin in his attitude."
One might perhaps pause to ask which figure
of the Elgin marbles either the mower or the
young labourer directly recalls ; and the critics
who are so ready with the cry might find some
difficulty in replying. But let us grant that
both figures do resemble the Greek statues ;
let us even suppose that some contemporary
of Phidias had left a statue in this very pose
of the mower — what then .^ If Walker's
164
FREDERICK WALKER
figures are true to that of which they and the
Elgin marbles alike are but reflections, to
life, that is, and to the natural unstudied
movements of human action — why com-
plain of what the later presentment has
in common with the earlier. But if the
complaint is that Walker's figures are like
the ancient marbles and are therefore not
like living humanity, then the complaint is
undoubtedly a proper one, and the only
remaining question is whether it be also true.
In this connection it becomes interesting to
hear how the figures strike persons well
acquainted with rustic life but not well ac-
quainted with the marbles in the British
Museum. It was my fortune to introduce
the picture, the other day, to precisely such
a person, a young girl devoted to country life,
keenly observant, with some taste for drawing
and only a slight and casual knowledge of the
Elgin marbles. She fastened instantly on the
mower s figure, exclaiming with delight at its
truth and precision. I, following in the steps
of critics from whom I totally dissented,
suggested that it was somewhat affected and
unnatural. She turned upon me, indignant,
165
FREDERICK WALKER
demanding whether I had ever looked at a
man mowings and I felt that her question was
the proper reply to Walker s critics.
The Escape (see p. 191):? a water-colour from
an illustration made in 186l^ dates from this
year^ and so does the beautiful frontispiece to
William Black's ^^ Daughter of Heth " (see
p. 185)— Walker's last illustration and surely
one of the most completely satisfactory ever
made. Another water-colour work of this
summer was The Village, which is reproached
with being "^a little too topographical" but
is delightfully simple and faithful. In October^
Walker wa'ote to Mr North : " I am working
hard at a fishmonger's shop with a great
slab of fish and a fair buyer." This under-
taking was of course the famous water-colour
in which^ on a space of 14| by 22| inches^ are
painted the whole shop-front and doorway^
three figures, besides the dog (a dog, I am
told, already introduced to fame in Forster's
" Life of Dickens "), and a slab displaying ^' the
metallic green of mackerel, the silver of
salmon, the shot sheen of herring, the rose of
red mullet, and all the intei-mingling russet
and golden browns and purples of gurnets and
1 66
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FREDERICK WALKER
plaice and perch and other fresh and salt-
water fish, flashing and playing into one
another with a splendour due to nature, but a
subtle harmony of arrangement due to the
painter."
A son of the original purchaser who, as a
boy, accompanied his father to the studio and
recalls Walker not as shy, but as singularly
quick, alert and full of life, tells me that after
naming the price — a high one, though doubt-
less lowxr than the present value — Walker
added as if in explanation : ^'^ I have put into
it all I know." No doubt he had. As a sheer
triumph of skill, knowledge and arrangement,
the drawing is the admiration of every artist.
It holds all that Walker at his highest point
of maturity knew — but not all that he felt.
It is a drawing to marvel at, to contemplate
admiringly at intervals, but not, I venture to
think, like The Old Farm Garden or Philip in
Church (to take examples at random), a draw-
ing to live with and love daily better.
In 1873, Walker was chiefly busy in seeking
a suitable setting for his proposed picture of
The Unknown Land, the completion of which
was forestalled by his death. Various places
169
FREDERICK WALKER
in Devonshire were tried without very much
success. In Somersetshire^ later on^ he was
again busy with a picture of mushroom
gatherers^ as well as with The Peaceful Thames,
but does not seem to have progressed easily
or to his own satisfaction with either. He
had apparently been ill earlier in the year and
his mother's health was now causing anxiety.
By the end of May he writes from Scotland^
'^ Am perfectly well.'' ..." I am feeling so much
better that it's difficult to imagine myself the
same worn-out^ nervous creature. It seems to
me that air and exercise alone will keep me
well and happy." Again^ a day or two later :
" Am a7ifully well and beginning to want to get
to serious work again." His failure to com-
plete the works on which he had just previously
been engaged was evidently not due to any
running short of ideas^ for he writes to Mr North
that he is "brim-full of subjects." Nor can it
be supposed that the powers of execution
displayed in 21ie Harbour of Refuge and
The Fishmonger s Shop were baffled by such
themes as The Peaceful Thames and Mushroom
Gatherers. But the human machine cannot be
worked at its highest stretch without con-
170
FREDERICK WALKER
siderable recuperative intervals ; and the very
fact that he had lately produced these master-
pieces may have been one reason why he was
unable at once to produce another. Now
with energies renewed he began to lay plans
for a picture — never_, alas, to be begun ! — of
men busy in iron works, and returned to the
background of The Unknoivn Land. In the
autumn comes an ominous letter of excuse :
'' There has developed on me a frightful cold
in the head and throat such as I have scarcely
ever had before." It is probable that from
this time Walker was never again really in
good health. In December he and Mr North
went to Algiers, where for a short time he
seemed better. A shadow hangs over his
letters, however, and behind his many resolutely
cheerful allusions to his mother's state of
health may be seen a constant terror, and in
February he rather suddenly returned home.
It is clear that the latter part of his stay was
a period of ill-health and wretchedness. Two
of his recorded sayings, a denunciation of the
aloe and prickly pear plants as made respectively
of zinc and putty, and a half-humorous, half-
pathetic lamentation that he should never see
FREDERICK WALKER
a hansom cab again^ show a gleam of his
characteristic aptness of description and his
characteristic quaint touch of self-caricature.
One little water-colour he made in Algiers
in which the African goat appears — ^judging
by a reproduction — to be dealt with in the
same happily sympathetic spirit as the English
dog^ cat and lamb in other work. The rest
of 1874 was a terrible period of illness — he
and his mother ill both together at home ;
his sister away with him^ still ill^ at Folkstone.
Then, when all were together at a farm near
Godalming, Miss Walker's health suddenly broke
down ; and Mrs Walker, herself little better
than an invalid, was reduced once more by
the exertion of nursing to serious and indeed
dangerous illness. Not till the middle of Sep-
tember was removal to town possible. Work,
which had of course been out of the question,
became imperative. Under medical orders,
but evidently with a divided heart. Walker
left his mother and sister settled at home and
went to join Mr North in Devonshire, taking
with him a drawing begun at Godalming and
eventually called The Rainbow. A girl kneels
on a chair before a window and near her
172
FREDERICK WALKER
stands a young woman^ apparently a servant.
The figure of the kneehng girl with its long line
of light hair is charmingly graceful and true ;
and the room has all the delicate^ unobtrusive
finish of detail in which Walker delighted.
The respite was brief. On the l6th of
November fell the stroke for which brother
and sister must have been prepared — the
death of their mother. In December Walker^
once more in Somersetshire with Mr Norths
was again attacked by illness^, and from the
local doctor Mr North learned that his friend's
lungs were affected. By February he was
back again in town^ where he completed a
replica of The Old Gate — his last exhibited
water-colour. His sister returned with him
to Somersetshire where he painted his last
picture^ The Right of Way, which was still hang-
ing in the Academy exhibition when he died.
This picture has been in Melbourne for
some years past and I do not like to trust to
memory for a description of its colouring. ^ It
^ A friend is kind enough to send me from Mel-
bourne the following note by an artist who went on
purpose to look at the picture : —
^^ The colouring is delicate but not weak. There is
173
FREDERICK WALKER
is^ however^ safe to say that the darkness of the
reproduction is untrue to the picture^ which is
bright and rather Hght in tone.
The last work upon which Walker was
engaged is declared to have been a water-
colour version of the figures on the terrace in
The Harbour of Refuge. It is not described as
being unfinished, but there is a rather crude
whiteness about the stone coping of the
balustrade which one may venture to be sure
Walker would not have permitted to remain.
In May he joined Mr H. E. Watts in Scotland,
and struck his friend as looking very ill, but
seemed to mend and was in good spirits. Only
a day or two before the final attack he sat
talking "full of life and enthusiasm/' about
his scheme for The Uriknoivn Land, and enquiring
eagerly about an island in the Bay of Auckland
a strong sense of atmosphere, a feeling of moisture
in the air. A yellow glow pervades the picture.
The trees have a faint brownish tinge through them ;
and the grey sky of departing winter has the faint
yellow glow of coming spring, as if the sun had no
strength yet but was coming through the moist
atmosphere. The green of the young spring grass
also is seen as through a strong yellow haze."
174
o 2
X s
FREDERICK WALKER
which Mr Watts had visited and which seemed
to offer a possible setting.
On the following Sunday afternoon as they
strolled by the loch^ at St Fillan's^ Walker
was seized with haemorrhage ; a local doctor
was called in, a physician summoned and Miss
Walker telegraphed for. For a fortnight he
lingered^ nursed by his devoted sister, and died
on June 4th, having barely reached the age
of 35.
He was buried on the 8th of June beside
his mother and brother, at Cookham, amid the
tears of a band of friends and fellow artists.
His sister followed him in the next year, living
long enough, however, to see with pride that
exhibition of her brother's collected works
which gave so high an idea both of the
greatness and the range of his powers.
wi» 177
VII
Besides his serious work in black and white,
water-colour and oil, with which the foregoing
chapters have dealt in some detail, Walker left
behind various other proofs of his talent. Of
his innumerable caricatures probably only
that of Captain Jinks appeared in print in his
own lifetime. ^ This drawing was made in
1 869 when Walker was staying at Maidenhead,
and owes its origin to the indignation with
which he viewed the steam launches that puffed
up and down the river, destroying all hope of
fish and disturbing the comfort of every lesser
craft. Mr Leslie, with whom he was staying
at the time, writes in '^^Our River" : —
^ Another drawing of Walker's was indeed pub-
lished in ^^ Punch " (New Bathing Company Limited
— specimens of Costumes to be worn by the Share-
holders, Almanack 1868), but can hardly be ranked
as a caricature.
178
FREDERICK WALKER
^^ He was most fastidious about this work^
rehearsing it many times before he was
satisfied ; sometimes it would look to him as
though he had taken too much pains with it^
and he carefully endeavoured to give it an air
of ease and carelessness. Then all the ugliest
and most disagreeable points about the affair
had to be emphasised : the boiler extra large
and clumsy, the smoke, the swell, the black-
faced engineer and the guests on board, with
their backs to the view, entirely wrapt up in their
cigars and brandies and sodas. In rendering
the distant landscape, the work becomes
entirely tender and finished — it is a beautiful
little bit of Bray, with the church and poplars
drawn direct from nature ; a bridge is intro-
duced to prevent the scene being too easily
recognised. On the opposite bank is a portrait
of myself with easel and picture upset by
the steamer's swell ; this mishap had actually
occurred to me one day at Monkey island.
Walker watched daily the embarkation of the
boat he had selected for his satire, and I
recollect him lying on the tiller of my punt,
taking keen mental notes of the appearance of
the captain of the craft ; it reminded me
l8i
FREDERICK WALKER
forcibly of a cat watching a bird hopping
about in unconscious ignorance."
This background of care sedulously con-
cealed behind an appearance of ease^ seems
to have been typical of Walker's work on
even the shghtest of productions^ and was
perhaps a matter not so much of deliberate
intention as of inborn character. W e find
him redrawing a caricature three times/
writing detailed notes as to the tiniest points
in the cutting of his invitation cards for Mr
Arthur Lewis's musical parties^ and hunting
as far a-field as SaHsbury for a prisoner's dock
to suit At the Bar. All four of the cards made
for Mr Lewis are reprinted in the ^^Life.''
One (see p. 37) — a medley in the taste of the
eighteenth century^ wherein a tree^ a lyre^ a
couple of masks^ a winding scroll, and a whole
tangle of grapes and vine leaves stand out
effectively from a background — shows Walker's
skill in design, a skill not always possessed
by the painter of pictures. No professed
designer could have filled the space more
satisfyingly. The others, full of talent as they
are (the Apollo engaged in lighting his pipe,
1 '' Life," p. 42.
182
FREDERICK WALKER
on the card for 1865^ is a particularly beautiful
figure)^ do not reveal any quality which might
not have been divined from the artist's pictures
and caricatures.
Looking through the series of caricatures^
one finds their special characteristic^ apart
from the precision and knowledge of their
drawings to be a singularly delicate perception
of character^ and especially of momentary
shades of feeling. A novelist might w^ell
look with envy at the way in which^ for
example^ the sketch on p. Ill of the ^^ Life " ^
gives at one glance every essential of a scene
which the most practised pen might fail
adequately to render in half a page. Here^
as so often^ his own weaknesses are touched
no less humorously than those of his neigh-
bour ; he shows us his sense of discomfort or
embarrassment, his shy attitude on the very
edge of his chair ; his struggles with his work ;
his chilliness as he sits, his feet, in a vain
hope of warmth, curled together on the bar
of his easel, his cap drawn down, his shoulders
drawn up, falling leaves swirling around and fly-
ing apples aiming themselves maliciously at his
1 ^^ Walker and Mr Agnew looking at Vagrants.''
183
FREDERICK WALKER
head — all this in the sketch not 2 J inches square^
labelled '^ E.N.E. Wind." ^ Another drawing
that depicts himself wearing the dress and laden
with the impedimenta of the tourist-fisherman
running in headlong pursuit of the Glasgow
train ; and yet another drawings often repro-
duced^ exhibits The Temptation of Saint
Antho7iy Walker. Here Walker^ the neatest
and trimmest of hermits^ his hair brushed in
unwonted smoothness from a central tonsure^
kneels beneath a delicate floating halo before
his easel^ while behind him rises an immense
visionaiy highlander pointing to a gigantic
salmon^ labelled : '' 26 Ibs.^ caught by Mr
Watts." Other salmon of every size and in
every conceivable position float circling round
the tempted one. In this delicately skilful
sketchy made in 1873^ we see plainly the
hand that produced 21ie Fishmonger s Shop ;
as in the poster for "The Woman in White/'
we see the hand that drew The Lost Path and
At the Bar.
Of late years many artists of distinction
have tried their hands at posters^ but in 1871
such attempts seem to have been unknown in
1 ^^Life/' p. 51.
184
X
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FREDERICK WALKER
England. A discussion that took place in his
presence as to posters for a forthcoming produc-
tion on the stage of "The Woman in White "
drew Walker's attention to the subject^ and he
designed a poster representing that hapless
person at life-size. That he perceived the
possibilities of this new departure is shown
by a letter in which he calls it "a first
attempt at what I consider might develop into a
7nost important branch oj art." The first sketch
is reproduced in the ^'^ Portfolio" ^ and the com-
pleted poster in the " Life." ^ Qf the former
Mr Phillips justly says that it is rather "too
academic and impersonal/' " too little sug-
gestive of the element of weirdness and
mystery in the story itself." But as usual,
work developed under Walker's hand, and
even in a reduced print the poster is vivid
and dramatic. In its full dimensions and in
its proper posture on a wall it must have been
impressive in a very marked degree. A woman
in a white dress and shawl is passing out
through an open door into a black night
spangled with white stars. Her right hand
is on the open door, her left is at her lips as
1 P. 36. '^ P. 233.
FREDERICK WALKER
she pauses looking back^ startled^ with terror
in her face. A lock of hair blowing loose on
her forehead gives the feeling at once of her
quick arrested motion and of the open air
without. The immense improvement upon
the first sketch that comes of the opening
inward instead of outward of the door is
very noteworthy. The outstretched hand^ a
little unmeaning before^ gains dramatic signi-
ficance, the perspective of the door gives a
depth to the composition^ and the outstanding
head of the key^ absolutely white upon absolute
blackness^ is of surprising value both to the eye
and the imagination.
Another piece of work outside Walker's
usual province was the beautiful outline of a
mermaid with long^ floating hair and arms
outstretched to a dimpled mer-baby^ which
he sketched on the wall of a room in Sir
William Agnew's house^ and which appears
on p. 216 of the ^^Life."
Looking at Walker's work as a whole^ one
can hardly fail to be struck by the volume^
the variety and the very high standard of his
output. That his few working years should
ever have been supposed idle is surely a most
i88
FREDERICK WALKER
curious delusion. But his visible work was
doubtless intermittent. Much of the labour
of creative genius must always lie out of
sight ; as Dumas said : '^'^11 y a un fier
dessous." To a man who did not understand
the gemiination of seeds the appearance of
harvests would no doubt seem strangely inter-
mittent. It is unfortunate^ however^ that the
word ^'^ irregular " should so often have been
applied to his methods of work^ since its
application seems in some quarters to have
been extended to his ways of life. I have
certainly read some years ago^ though I regret
that I am unable to fix the passage^ an in-
sinuation^ if not indeed a direct statement^ that
his life was shortened by such "irregularity."
It seems well;, therefore^ to say definitely that
any opinion of the kind is quite without
foundation. The only imprudent course by
which Walker can possibly have shortened his
life was by working too zealously, especially
out of doors in unfavourable weather. The
touching expressions of full confidence in him
and of complete approval that occur in private
letters between those to whom his whole life
was intimately familiar, are entirely incom-
i8o
FREDERICK WALKER
patible with any conception of him as the
dissipated genius whose weaknesses bring him
to a premature grave.
As to his general character^ nothing is more
marked than the warm and enduring affection
with which he inspired the large proportion of
those persons who came into close contact with
him ; and the more closely one studies his
letters^ his acts and his spoken words^ the
more assured does one become that Mr North's
estimate is just : " In my though t^ after all
these years^ he remains a very clear and noble
figure^ without a trace of meanness. Hasty^
impatient^ with a grand contempt for paltry
worldliness ; and absolutely, in the truest
sense, unselfish."
But to us, who can never come face to face
with the man, it is, after all, the artist who
is really important. For us the questions are
how and why Walker merited that pre-
eminence which the artists of his own day
accorded him,^ and what, to us, are the
special revelations, the special delights afforded
by his art.
His natural, specifically pictorial endowment
1 See note to p. 10 of ^' Our River."
190
FREDERICK WALKER
was not probably quite so fine as that of
Millais ; it is likely that he neither saw so
swiftly nor manipulated so surely and easily ;
his first impression was probably neither so
vivid nor so sure. But Millais^ with all his
robustness of view and handlings seldom or
never went beyond that first view^ and his
work too often partook of the quality which
in literature we should call journalistic. With
Walker the first impression remained^ grew^
matured and developed until it had reached
its utmost range of expression. And the
range of expression ultimately discernible by
his delicately sensitive temperament being far
beyond what most of us^ clumsy and untrained
as we are^ can perceive for ourselves^ his pic-
tures do really and literally enlarge our world.
To have lived intimately with Walker's work
is to dwell thenceforward in a universe whose
common sights of daily life are touched with
a new light and informed with a new beauty
— a universe in which humanity seems to call
for a deeper tenderness^ a more tolerant smile^
a gentler recognition.
That his genius had attained its full develop-
ment is an opinion which no person can
N 193
FREDERICK WALKER
possibly hold who has attentively followed the
steps of its progress. It is no more credible
that the work of Frederick Walker was finished
at five-and-thirty than that the work of Keats
was finished or the work of Marlowe^ nay, we
may even trace, in the records of his last years
and in the notes of future work left to us, the
course which his immediate development would
probably have followed. He had been passing
through a period of great dissatisfaction ; his
mind was full of conceptions which his hand
could not — in oils — execute with the full per-
fection demanded by his fastidious judgment.
In other words, he was at a period, not of
stagnation, but of rapid artistic growth. The
subjects which he contemplated showed not
change but expansion ; they were still marked
by a character of generality, they still dealt
with phases of human feeling, but were touched
by a w^armer ardour of living activity ; the
labour on a great scale of ironworkers, the
expectant wonder of mariners approaching an
unvisited shore — these were the themes on
which his mind was dwelling. Of The Un-
hiown hand several sketches remain. In that
reproduced on p. ^b^ of the '^ Life " there are
194
FREDERICK WALKER
certain elements of greatness that had never
before been so surely marked. Never had his
glow of light been so purely luminous ; never
in his many studies of human feeling had he
sounded so trumpet-like a note ; nowhere had
his colour been more perfectly satisfying. To
look at this drawing is to feel how immeasur-
able was the loss that English art suffered in
Walker's deaths and to guess dimly at the
height of achievement that he might have
touched in another twenty years of work.
Walker's technical execution^ like his out-
look on life, was distinctly individual. His
methods^ alike in black and white^ in water-
colour and in oils^ were his own^ and his aim
in all three mediums seems to have been
the attainment of broad effects without a
sacrifice of finish. In black and white and in
w^ater-colour he arrived admittedly at mastery ;
and in oils touched it certainly in the Harbour
of liefuge and The Plough. The fact that his
methods as an oil painter^ reproached at first,
now appear quite normal, while those of Ward
and Frith strike us as almost Chinese, shows
that he was moving with the main current.
His method has probably influenced his sue-
^9S
FREDERICK WALKER
cessors less than his point of view ; he has
taught less as a craftsman than as an artist ;
not the hand but the spirit has learned from him.
He had in a marked degree that clear per-
ception of the actual world around him without
which the creative artist either in words or
in pictures seldom succeeds in striking any
widely and deeply human note. It is Miss
Austen^ not Mrs RadclifFe^ who shows us our
own human nature^ together with the '^ sprigged
muslins" and the '^'^sirs" and '^'^ madams" of
our great-grandmothers. So^ just because
Walker shows us the early middle Victorian
period with so unblinking a veracity^ he remains
not only the truest interpreter of that period
with all its high thoughts and all its uncon-
sciously hideous externals^ but also a true
interpreter of our own and every coming age.
To him^ as to all true artists^ the person was
more than the raiment ; to the majority in
his^ as in all healthy social ages^ a man was
more than his possessions. In our day we
have learned to be much more fastidious about
externals — thereby much comforting our eyes
and much multiplying our cares — but we have
in great measure lost grasp of the vital inner
196
FREDERICK WALKER
essentials of character and personality. Our
standard of furniture is much higher^ but our
personal manners have singularly decayed ; we
dress better^ but we speak worse^ and it seems
sadly probable that the ghosts of Thackeray
and Walker^ if they could pass together through
the London that they knew so well, would
agree in finding us more outwardly prosperous
but less friendly, more travelled but less well-
read, more vulgar and, in fundamental things,
less educated than those fathers and mothers
of ours who wore top hats like Philip's and
bonnets like the Little Sister's.
This is perhaps the reason why, as one of
Walker's truest friends and warmest admirers
said to me : '^ Just now, you know, ' Walkers
are down.' " It is also, no doubt, the ex-
planation of that sort of bond of fellowship
which a common love for his work seems to
create, and to which, in the course of writing
these pages, I have owed so many pleasant
hours and so much kindness. That " Walkers "
should remain '^'^down" is surely highly im-
probable. Apart from the reasonable hope
that the wave of vulgarity and externality
will presently sink as it has risen, we may
FREDERICK WALKER
remember that it is after all largely superficial.
In a population so vast as ours there must
always be a considerable public attuned to
a note so singularly national as Walker's^ and
that democratisation which brings home art
and books to an ever-widening circle can but
bring him in fresh admirers.
198
POPULAR LIBRARY OF ART
Each Volume, i^fuo, about 200 pp.
Average Number of Ilhtstrations, 45.
ROSSETTI. By Ford Madox Hueffer.
ALBRECHT DURER. By Lina Eckenstein.
REMBRANDT. By Auguste Breal.
FREDERICK WALKER. By Clementina Black.
MILLET. By Romain Rolland.
In Preparation,
LEONARDO DA VINCI. By Dr Georg Gronau.
WATTS. By G. K. Chesterton.
CRUIKSHANK. By W. H. Chesson.
HOGARTH. By Edward Garnett.
BOTTICELLI. By Mrs Henry Ady.
&c., &c., &c.
Each Volume will include 30 to 60 Illustrations,
selected by the writers of the Volumes to fully illustrate
their text, and Engraved by Messrs Walker &
COCKERELL.
See Prospectus .
LONDON : DUCKWORTH & CO.
NEW YORK : E. P. DUTTON & CO.
YB 80020
320289
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