Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/519

 number of books, among them being Browning's Poems (1898), Tales from Boccaccio (1899), The Chiswick Shakespeare (1900), The Pilgrim's Progress (1904), and Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1909). As an art teacher Shaw was active at the school of art on Campden Hill which he established, in partnership with Rex Vicat Cole, in 1911. He was elected an associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1913.

Byam Shaw has been called ‘a kind of belated pre-Raphaelite’. This description refers, however, mainly to the external trappings of his art, which, while showing the resourceful illustrator's inventiveness and considerable sleight of hand, is yet essentially of a somewhat superficial and scenic character.

Shaw married in 1899 Evelyn, daughter of J. N. Pyke-Nott, of Bydown, North Devon, by whom he had four sons and one daughter. He died in London 26 January 1919.

 SHAW, RICHARD NORMAN (1831–1912), architect, was born in Edinburgh 7 May 1831, the youngest son of William Shaw, by his wife, Elizabeth Brown. His mother was Scotch; the father, who died before he was two years old, came from county Meath, of Protestant Irish stock with a Huguenot strain. The boy went to school at the Hill Street Academy, Edinburgh, and afterwards for a year at Newcastle; but his education was chiefly imparted by his elder sister. At fifteen years old, when he went with the family to London, his bent for architecture was recognized. He was apprenticed to a small architect; and shortly after passed into the office of William Burn [q.v.] in Piccadilly. He was there for seven years, at a time when Burn, in the full tide of practice, was designing ‘mansions’ for territorial magnates in all parts of Great Britain and Ireland. Norman Shaw in this pupilage was well schooled in the art of planning country-houses, and acquired that clean, clear draughtsmanship, by which he won the silver medal of the Royal Academy in 1852, and the gold medal for design in 1853. Next year he was given the travelling studentship of the Academy, and during his year and a half of travel visited Rome, Prague, and Lübeck, as well as the French cathedrals.

At that time, thanks to the enthusiasm of George Edmund Street [q.v.] and William Burges [q.v.], the Gothic of the thirteenth century in France had become the gospel of English art. Viollet le Duc's Dictionnaire de l'Architecture had just been published, and for Shaw remained the classic of Gothic construction; William Butterfield [q.v.] never ceased to be his ideal of the church architect. Indeed, like Burges, Shaw proved his faith by designing furniture after French mediaeval models. The immediate fruit, however, of his travelling year was the publication in 1858 of Architectural Sketches from the Continent—lithograph illustrations drawn by himself from his sketches of French churches. In 1859 he entered the office of G. E. Street, succeeding Philip Webb [q.v.] as chief assistant. Yet this strict school of mediaeval ritual equipped neither Webb nor Shaw as orthodox stylists. What both gained was the conscience of the building artist—the personal sense of aesthetic creation which was to be as clear in Shaw's ‘Gothic’ churches as in his so-called ‘free classic’.

In 1862 Shaw started practice in Argyll Street, Regent Street, with William Eden Nesfield [q.v.], who had been a fellow-student in Burn's office, and for a time his companion in France. Formal partnership did not last, but the two occupied the same office till 1876, and these fourteen years brought Shaw to the front of his profession. In 1868 he designed James Knight's bank at Farnham; and other early clients were the shipowners, Shaw, Savill & Co., his brother's company, for whom in 1871 he designed New Zealand Chambers in Leadenhall Street; the street elevation of this, with its projecting bays and Jacobean glazings, was an evident protest against humdrum city classicalities; still more was it a challenge to the mediaeval stylists. About the same time John Callcott Horsley, R.A. [q.v.], began to give Shaw work, and soon he had many commissions from members of the Royal Academy. Elected an associate in 1872, he became full academician in 1877. For a short time he had been a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects, but he never became a fellow. His attitude towards the Institute is explained in Architecture, a Profession or an Art? (1891), of which he was joint-editor with (Sir) T. G. Jackson.

Building for artists, Shaw was in the swim of that golden age of the Victorian painter, when, after a year or two of Academy recognition, the artist got a competency and built himself a palace-studio in the developing suburbs of Kensington or South Hampstead. In this ‘artist’ building Shaw was the  493