Walker was of a very excitable nature, and with his rapidly growing power and popularity, soon got a high sense of his own importance. One day he came to us in an angry, irritated state, saying he had just finished a large water colour drawing that a well-known dealer had promised to come and see, but had failed to do so. "I want, when he comes to-day, to be able to say, 'That picture is sold.' Can you help me in this humiliating position?" After a few words of consultation, we said, "Yes, we will give you a hundred guineas for it." The picture was not a good example either in subject or treatment. It was a social scene, called "Strange Faces," but had a special interest in the fact that William Harvey, whom we had introduced to Walker, stood as model for the principal figure.
"God knows all he does for the poor baby; how cheerfully he carries him in his arms when he himself is weak and ill; how he feeds him when he himself is griped with want; how he folds his ragged jacket round him, lays his little worn face with a woman's tenderness upon his sun-burnt breast."
"The Long Voyage."—Charles Dickens.
FROM "REPRINTED PIECES."
By Frederick Walker, A.R.A., R.W.S.
By permission of Messrs. Chapman & Hall.
His first picture in oil, exhibited in the Royal Academy, was done from his drawing, "A Woman in the Snow," published in Good Words, and engraved by us.
About this time we commissioned him to make thirty drawings on wood the same size as those of Birket Foster's "Pictures of English Landscape." These he willingly undertook, and worked at earnestly; but the great demand for his pictures increased so rapidly that the drawings came less and less frequently, and at last the scheme fell through, after his having given us some eight or ten. All of these were perfect works of their class, and it would have made a grand book had it been completed. Later, we published the engravings with those of other artists, mostly by G. J. Pinwell and J. W. North, first in "A Round of Days" and "Home Affections," and afterwards in an India paper edition, as "Pictures of English Rustic Life," by Frederick Walker, A.R.A., and G. J. Pinwell, R.W.S. One of the designs we had a small water colour drawing of, "Come in out of the Rain"; also one of "Strange Faces," which, being in his later manner, was far better than the original picture.