Drawn by A. Boyd Houghton.

Swan Electro-Engraving Co.

READING THE CHRONICLES

The mass of work accomplished in illustration alone, between his first appearance and his death in 1875, is amazing. There is scarce a periodical of any rank which has not at least one example from his pen. The curt attention given here to the man must be pardoned, as reference to his work is made on almost every page of this book. For an appreciative essay, that is a model of its class, one has but to turn to Mr. Laurence Housman's volume[12] which contains also five original drawings on wood (reproduced in photogravure) and eighty-three others from Dalziel's Arabian Nights (Ward, Lock & Co., 1863-65 and Warne, 1866), Don Quixote, the two volumes of Mr. Robert Buchanan's Poems—Ballad Stories of the Affections (1866), and North Coast (1868), Home Thoughts (1865), National Nursery Rhymes (1871), and The Graphic (1870).

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Frederick Walker[13] (1840–1875), who was born in Marylebone on the 26th of May 1840, has been the subject of so many appreciations, and at least one admirable monograph, that a most brief notice of his career as an illustrator will suffice here. His father was a designer of jewelry and his grandfather had some skill in portrait-painting. How he began drawing from the Elgin marbles in the British Museum at the age of sixteen has been told often enough. Many boys of sixteen have done the same, but it is open to doubt if any one of them has absorbed the spirit of their models so completely as Fred Walker did. It would be hardly asserting too much to say for him that they replaced humanity, and that his male figures seem nearly always youths from the Parthenon in peasant costume. At seventeen or eighteen he was working at Leigh's life-class in Newman Street, and at the same time was employed in Mr. Whymper's wood-engraving establishment. His first appearance in Everybody's Journal is duly noted elsewhere, also his first drawing in Once a Week; but the peculiar affection he had inspired by his work has kept most of his critics from saying that some of his earliest designs, as we know them after engraving, appear distinctly poor. But, from the time he ceased to act as 'ghost' for Thackeray, and signed his work with the familiar F. W., his career shows a distinct and sustained advance until the ill-fated 1875, in which George Mason, G. J. Pinwell, and A. Boyd Houghton also died.

It is unnecessary to recapitulate in brief the various contributions to the Cornhill Magazine, Good Words, Once a Week, etc., which have already been noted in detail. Nor would it be in place here to dwell upon the personality of the artist; sufficient matter has been printed already to enable lovers of his works to construct a faithful portrait of their author—lovable and irritable, with innate genius and hereditary disease both provoking him to petulant outbursts that still live in his friends' memories. One anecdote will suffice. A group of well-known painters were strolling across a bridge on the Upper Thames. Walker, who was passionately fond of music, had been playing on a tin whistle, which one of the party, half in joke, half weary of the fluting, struck from his mouth, so that it fell into the stream below. In a moment Walker had thrown off his clothes, and, 'looking like a statue come to life, so exquisitely was he built,' plunged from the wall of the bridge, and, diving, rescued his tin whistle, which he bore to land in triumph. The trifling incident is an epitome of the character of the wayward boy, who kept his friends nevertheless. 'He did not seek beauty,' wrote an ardent student of his work, 'but it came, while Pinwell thought of and strove for beauty always, yet often failed to secure it.' That he knew Menzel, and was influenced by him, is an open secret; but he also owes much to the pre-Raphaelites—Millais especially. Yet when all he learned from contemporary artists is fully credited, what is left, and it is by far the largest portion, is his own absolutely—owing nothing to any predecessor, except possibly to the sculptors of Greece. He died in Scotland in June 1875, and was buried at the Marlow he painted so delightfully, leaving behind him the peculiar immortality that is awarded more readily to a half-fulfilled life than to one which has accomplished all it set out to do, and has outlived its own reputation.

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George John Pinwell (1842–1875).—This notable illustrator, whose work bulks so largely in the latter half of the sixties, was born December 26, 1842, and died September 8, 1875. He studied at the Newman Street Academy, entering in 1862. At first his illustrations show little promise; some of the earliest, in Lilliput Levée, a book of delightful rhymes for children, by Matthew Browne, are singularly devoid of interest. No engraver's name appears on them, nor is it quite clear by what process they were reproduced. They are inserted plates, and, under a strong magnifying glass, the lines suggest lithography. The unfamiliar medium, supposing they were drawn in lithographic ink, or by graphotype, or some similar process, would account for the entire absence of the qualities that might have been expected. Some others, in Hacco the Dwarf and in The Happy Home, the latter in crude colours, are hardly more interesting.