“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.