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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.
THE UNJUST JUDGE
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.)