WALKER.L’Art.
THE BATHERS.
(By permission of Messrs. Thomas Agnew & Sons, the owners of the copyright.)

Fred Walker, the Tennyson of painting, was born in London in 1840, and had scarcely left school before the galleries of ancient art in the British Museum became his favourite place of resort. Drawings for wood-engraving were his first works, and with Millet in France he has the chief merit of having put fresh life into the traditional style of English wood engraving, so that he is honoured by the young school of wood-engravers as their lord and master. His first, and as yet unimportant, drawings appeared in 1860 in a periodical called Once a Week, for which Leech, Millais, and others also made drawings. Shortly after this début he was introduced to Thackeray, then the editor of Cornhill, and he undertook the illustrations with Millais. In these plates he is already seen in his charm, grace, and simplicity. His favourite season is the tender spring, when the earth is clothed with young verdure, and the sunlight glances over the naked branches, and the children pluck the first flowers which have shot up beneath their covering of snow.

His pictures give pleasure by virtue of the same qualities—delicacy of drawing, bloom of colouring, and a grace which is not affected in spite of its Grecian rhythm.

L’Art.L’Art.
BOUGHTON.GREEN LEAVES AMONG THE SERE.BOUGHTON.SNOW IN SPRING.
(By permission of the Artist.)(By permission of the Artist.)

Walker was the first to introduce that delicate rosy red which has since been popular in English painting. His method of vision is as widely removed from that of Manet as from Couture’s brown sauce. The surface of every one of his pictures resembles a rare jewel in its delicate finish: it is soft, and gives the sense of colour and of refined and soothing harmony. His first important work, “Bathers,” was exhibited in 1867 at the Royal Academy, where works of his appeared regularly during the next five years. About a score of young people are standing on the verge of a deep and quiet English river, and are just about to refresh themselves in the tide after a hot August day. Some, indeed, are already in the water, while others are sitting upon the grass and others undressing. The frieze of the Parthenon is recalled, so plastic is the grace of these young frames, and the style and repose of the treatment of lines, which are such as may only be found in Puvis de Chavannes. In his next picture, “The Vagrants,” he represented a group of gipsies camping round a fire in the midst of an English landscape. A mother is nursing her child, while to the left a woman is standing plunged in thought, and to the right a lad is throwing wood upon the faintly blazing fire. Here, too, the figures are all drawn severely after nature and yet have the air of Greek statues. There is no modern artist who has united in so unforced a manner actuality and fidelity to nature with “the noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” of the antique. In a succeeding picture of 1870, “The Plough,” a labourer is striding over the ground behind the plough. The long day is approaching its end, and the moon stands silvery in the sky. Far into the distance the field stretches away, and the heavy tread of the horses mingles in the stillness of evening with the murmur of the stream which flows round the grassy ridge, making its soft complaint. “Man goeth forth to his work and to his labour until the evening” is its thoroughly English motto. The same still mournfulness of sunset he painted in that work of marvellous tenderness, “The Old Gate.” The peace of dusk is resting upon a soft and gentle landscape. A lady who is the owner of a country mansion and is dressed like a widow has just stepped out from the garden gate, accompanied by her maid, who is in the act of shutting it; children are playing on the steps, and a couple of labourers are going past in front and look towards the lady of the house. It is nothing except the meeting of certain persons, a scene such as takes place every day, and yet even here there is a subtlety and tenderness which raise the event from the prose of ordinary life into a mysterious world of poetry.

In his later period he deviated more and more towards a fragrant lyricism. In his great picture of 1872, “The Harbour of Refuge,” the background is formed by one of those peaceful buildings where the aged poor pass the remainder of their days in meditative rest. The sun is sinking, and there is a rising moon. The red-tiled roof stands out clear against the quiet evening sky, while upon the terrace in front, over which the tremulous yellow rays of the setting sun are shed, an old woman with a bowed figure is walking, guided by a graceful girl who steps lightly forward. It is the old contrast between day and night, youth and age, strength and decay. Yet in Walker there is no opposition after all. For as light mingles with the shadows in the twilight, this young and vigorous woman who paces in the evening, holding the arm of the aged in mysterious silence, has at the moment no sense of her youth, but is rather filled with that melancholy thought underlying Goethe’s “Warte nur balde,” “Wait awhile and thou shalt rest too.” Her eyes have a strange gaze, as though she were looking into vacancy in mere absence of mind. And upon the other side of the picture this theme of the transient life of humanity is still further developed. Upon a bench in the midst of a verdant lawn covered with daisies a group of old men are sitting meditatively near a hedge of hawthorn luxuriant in blossom. Above the bench there stands an old statue casting a clearly defined shadow upon the gravel path, as if to point to the contrast between imperishable stone and the unstable race of men, fading away like the autumn leaves. Well in the foreground a labourer is mowing down the tender spring grass with a scythe—a strange, wild, and rugged figure, a reaper whose name is Death.

BOUGHTON.L’Art.
A BREATH OF WIND.
(By permission of the Artist.)

It was not long before evening drew on for the painter, and Death, the mighty reaper, laid him low.

Of a nervous and sensitive temperament, Walker had one of those natures which find their way with difficulty through this rude world of fact. Those little things which he had the art of painting so beautifully, and which occupy such an important place in his work, had, in another sense, more influence upon his life than ought to have been the case. While Mason faced all unpleasantnesses with stoical indifference, Walker allowed himself to be disturbed and hindered in his work by every failure and every sharp wind of criticism. In addition to that he was, like Mason, a victim of consumption. A residence in Algiers merely banished the insidious disease for a short time. Amongst the last works, which he exhibited in 1875, a considerable stir was made by a drawing called “The Unknown Land”: a vessel with naked men is drawing near the shores of a wide and peaceful island bathed in a magical light. Soon afterwards Walker had himself departed to that unknown land: he died in Scotland when he was five-and-thirty. His body was brought to the little churchyard at Cookham on the banks of the Thames. In this village Fred Walker is buried amid the fair river landscape which he so loved and so often painted.

BOUGHTON.L’Art.
THE BEARERS OF THE BURDEN.
(By permission of the Artist.)