Chapter VIII: Frederick Walker

I think it was a criticism of Sidney Colvin’s in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ upon his picture called “The Plough” that first drew me to a closer study of Fred Walker’s work. Sidney Colvin had preceded me as Art Critic of the _Pall Mall_, and I am very conscious that in my first efforts in art criticism I closely modelled myself upon his style.

He and Bernal Payne had already done much to direct public attention to the new movement in Art before I entered the field. And it was not wonderful, in view of Colvin’s eloquent advocacy of the men whom I most deeply admired, that I should have been drawn to the art of Fred Walker, whose talent he had particularly distinguished.

A little later I got to know Walker himself, but he was difficult to know well, not by reason of any deliberate reserve, but because of an unconquerable shyness which was deeply rooted in his character. Shy in his ordinary converse as a man, he was no less so in regard to his pictures. As one entered his studio he would always turn the work upon which he was engaged with its face to the wall, and

From _Good Words_.

By FREDRICK WALKER, A.R.A., R.W.S.

Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel. (Reproduced from their _Fifty Years’ Work_.)

_To face page 103._ ]

could rarely be induced to allow his visitor any glimpse of it.

Shortly after his death, which occurred in 1875, I wrote the introductory note to the catalogue of his collected works exhibited in Bond Street, and, wishing for some closer knowledge of the man than I could boast, I had recourse to Mr. George Leslie, who had known him long and well.

I find an interesting letter of his written to me about that time, and concerning, among many other things, Walker’s stay in Algiers, where he had gone for his health. Leslie had asked me to meet Miss Jeykell, who had been in Algiers at the time, but as I was unable to accept his invitation he very kindly jotted down for me some notes of his conversation with her, adding at the same time some interesting reflections upon Walker’s character which throw much light upon his temperament as an artist.

“Miss Jeykell,” he writes to me in a letter dated February 10, 1876, “was there with Madam Bodichon when Walker arrived, and came home with him. She says that nothing could have exceeded his delight on arriving, with the light, bright climate and the novelty of everything, and he had immediately a great wish to send for his sister to come out and live there. But very soon, in about a fortnight or three weeks, his strong family affections began to tell on him and he grew terribly home-sick, and gradually took a sort of horror for the whole place. This feeling grew and grew on him, and he became quite ill. He longed to be back in England. With almost despair he said if he could only be in a hansom cab once again he should be quite happy. Madam Bodichon and Miss Jeykell one day took him out with them for a driving excursion round the country and along the sea-shore, and this, she said, seemed to be one of the only days he enjoyed thoroughly. The shores were very picturesque and rocky, and they visited beautiful little bays of pure sand and quaint shells, where Fred Walker strolled about and seemed very much struck, no doubt contemplating his intended picture.

“They left him alone when he seemed to wish it, and he sat gazing at the rocks and sea in deep thought. He had his flute with him, and would accompany Miss Jeykell, who used to sing. She said, what I can endorse myself, that he played in a manner quite peculiar, full of tender feeling and prettiness.

“Finally his illness and his growing disgust of the place grew so much worse that they got quite anxious about him, and when Miss Jeykell and her companion were about to return home they proposed to take him with them. In a perfectly helpless way he eagerly accepted the kindness, allowing them to do everything for him, even packing his pictures for him, securing his passage, and paying his bills, etc. He went on board the steamer so ill that Miss Jeykell felt anxious about him, fearing he might not survive till he reached home.

“But the morning after they started, when she had gone to look for him in his cabin, she found him walking the deck in his little shooting-jacket, and quite revived with the idea of home. He relapsed, however, in his journey through France, and the hatred of Algiers returned at the very sound of the French tongue.

“They arrived, however, quite safely at last, and Miss Jeykell at Charing Cross Station said, ‘There, Mr. Walker, is a hansom cab.’ He got in, waved his hand in a playful excited way, and that was the last time she ever saw him.”

And then follows a very interesting comparison between the characters of Fred Walker and Sir Edwin Landseer, which Mr. Leslie was well qualified to make, as he had known them both for many years.

“I used to see them both,” he writes, “for several years during the same time, and so was always being reminded one of the other. They were both disposed to be a little tyrannical in disposition; they both expected everything to be done for them. They were both extremely sensitive to criticism and public opinion, and they both possessed a tender and intense feeling for music.

“Walker could not play before friends, as the tears would run down his cheeks, and I have heard Landseer sing with the tears in his eyes. Landseer had not much voice, but a very sweet pathetic feeling. They both had strong family affections, and each possessed a devoted sister who ministered to their every want.

“They each had the same reluctance to show their pictures. Even when they had gone to the Exhibition, they would fret and worry and make themselves ill as to what would be thought of them. They both possessed an intense ambition to excel in Art. Walker once confessed to me that he meant to be _the_ best artist, or the ‘very top,’ as he said, and Landseer had quite the same ruling passion.

“They both had a keen sense of humour, and both drew admirable caricatures. Landseer would, with three or four lines, give you the very essence of any one’s face, and you know how well poor Fred Walker did this. They were both very silent about Art, or rather about pictures; they neither of them had very much education, but somehow were far more neat in their choice of words than most other artists.

“They both were extremely fastidious in their work, altering and altering again and again; often a picture took up a year or two.

“Lastly, in dress they were something alike, both very fond of rather a sporting style, and indeed they were both decided sportsmen in taste. They were both, too, when I knew them, tinged with a kind of despairing feeling of melancholy, not of a slow languishing kind, but with a quick intense fever, covered over with a pretty sparkle of wit and cheerfulness when in the society of friends. The thing that always struck me about Walker and Landseer was, that the young man of thirty was like the other of sixty, and I have often said to Marks, ‘He could never live, he has already arrived at what is the end of Landseer.’”

Poor Walker died in 1875 at the early age of thirty-five. He had exhibited once in the Royal Academy after his return from Algiers, and it was while his picture was hanging upon the walls at Burlington House that we heard of his sudden death, due to a violent chill he had contracted during a fishing excursion in Scotland.

It was not very long before his death that I paid my last visit to his studio, and although, as was his custom, the canvas upon which he was engaged was speedily wheeled round and turned with its face to the wall, I caught just a glimpse of his subject, which afterwards formed the matter of our talk. It was to be called “The Unknown Land,” and it is characteristic of the whole bent of his talent, and of the special way in which his imagination worked, that the last of his designs, left a mere fragment at the date of his death, was no more than a development of a drawing which he had contributed years before to the pages of _Once a Week_.

But it is to be acknowledged that Walker was never prolific in his inventions in the ordinary sense of the term. Nothing is more remarkable in his gradual progress than the strong and enduring attachment he displayed to certain motives in composition that at first found expression in his boyhood. As his art advanced, this inspiration of his earlier days was taken up again and enforced with all the riper resources of his manhood.

His great picture of “The Bathers” must have already been suggested to him by one of a series of illustrations representing the seasons which had also appeared in the pages of _Once a Week_, and many another instance might be cited which would tend to show the strong allegiance of his maturity to ideas which had first won his devotion as a boy.

Mr. Leslie’s vivid sketch of Walker, and his just appreciation of his character, corresponds closely enough with the man as I knew him in the later days of his life. He seemed to me to be always to the last degree fastidious in his own judgment upon his work, and so exacting in his demands upon himself that I think it was from this source there sprang up the disinclination which he always showed to submitting his pictures to the criticism of others.

The struggle he went through with himself in endeavouring to carry to a successful issue the thought that had formed in his brain was so severe that it left him, when the task was complete, with no courage to face an opinion which might, as he feared, be even less favourable than his own.

But although he shunned any discussion upon pictures painted by himself, he was, as I recall him now, always eager and enthusiastic in his talk of the wider and more general ideals of Art, enthusiastic also in his occasional references to those among his contemporaries whom he specially admired. Looking back upon his achievement now, it is easy to perceive, and it would be folly not to acknowledge, that some of that higher beauty which he sought to find in those rustic subjects that were dear to him was occasionally imposed upon reality by a conscious and wilful reference to the beauty of the antique.

But even if this criticism be admittedly just, his claims as a painter remain undisturbed. The added grace that he bestowed upon reality was resident in nature itself, and there is reason to think that if time had allowed his powers to be fully developed he would have achieved what he sought without direct dependence upon classic example. The two separate elements of his art--his direct

To-night will be a stormy night,
You to the town must go,
And take the lantern, child, to light
Your mother through the snow.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

By Sir JOHN GILBERT, R.A., P.R.W.S.

Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel. (Reproduced from their _Fifty Years’ Work_.)

_By permission of Messrs. George Routledge and Sons, Ltd._

_To face page 109._ ]

and searching study of the facts of the actual world, and his passionate love of the beauty of the antique--were in process of being united but they were not yet absolutely fused in one. His early death left the story of his art life incomplete, but there is enough and more than enough to vindicate his position in our school.

On the occasion of one of my rare visits to his studio he had given me some brief account of the first years of his studentship. When he first quitted school at the age of sixteen he occupied himself in copying from the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum. For a while his purely artistic studies were interrupted by his apprenticeship to an architect, but after only eighteen months of labour that was never congenial to him we find him once more at the Museum, while during the evenings of this period he attended the classes in Leigh’s School in Newman Street, making there the acquaintance of several other young artists with whom he remained on terms of closest friendship during the rest of his life.

A little later he entered the school of the Royal Academy, and about the same time began to employ himself with drawing on the wood which he learnt from Mr. T. W. Whymper, in whose establishment he remained for a period of three years.

At that date Sir John Gilbert was the accepted model for young men who desired to succeed in book illustration, and I remember Walker telling me that in all his earlier essays he was rigidly held to a strict conformity with Gilbert’s style. But it was not long before he formed a method of his own, and, soon after _Once a Week_ was established in 1859, Walker became a constant contributor to its pages. Later again he sought and found employment from Mr. Thackeray on the _Cornhill Magazine_, where he illustrated the editor’s own story of _Philip_.

He used often to tell me of his visits to Thackeray’s house, where he went to settle with the great novelist the subject of the next illustration. During a considerable part of the time Thackeray was ill and confined to his room, and the young draughtsman would sit at the side of the bed and listen to the details of the story as they came from Thackeray’s own lips.

From _The Parables of our Lord_.

By Sir J. E. MILLAIS, Bart., P.R.A.

Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel.

(Reproduced from their _Fifty Years’ Work_.)

_To face page 111._ ]