Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 59.djvu/57

 and different heraldic questions are among Ashmole's manuscripts in the Bodleian Library.



WALKER, FREDERICK (1840–1875), painter, was born in London at 90 Great Titchfield Street on 26 May 1840. He was the fifth son and seventh child of William Henry Walker, and Ann (née Powell) his wife. He was the elder of twins. His father was a working jeweller with a small business. Frederick Walker's grandfather, William Walker, was an artist of some merit, and between 1782 and 1808 exhibited regularly with the Royal Academy and the British Institution. Two excellent portraits of himself and his wife are still extant. Frederick Walker is also believed to have inherited artistic ability from his mother, who was a woman of fine sensibilities, and at one time supplemented the family income by her skill in embroidery. William Henry Walker died about 1847, leaving eight surviving children. Frederick was for a time at a school in Cleveland Street, but such education as he had was chiefly received at the North London collegiate school in Camden Town. Relics from his schooldays show that the passion for drawing sprang up in him very early. His earliest endeavours to train himself in any systematic fashion seem to have consisted in copying prints in pen and ink.

In 1855 Walker was placed in an architect's office in Gower Street, where he remained until early in 1857. He then gave up architecture, became a student at the British Museum, and at James Mathews Leigh's academy in Newman Street. A few months later he began to think of the Royal Academy, to which he was admitted as a student in March 1858. In none of these schools, however, was he a very constant attendant. Late in 1858 he took a step which had a decisive influence on his career. He apprenticed himself to Josiah Wood Whymper, the wood engraver, whose atelier was at 20 Canterbury Place, Lambeth. There he worked steadily for two years, acquiring that knowledge of the wood-cutter's technique which afterwards enabled him profoundly to affect the progress of the art. He never confined himself to a single groove, however. During his apprenticeship to Whymper he devoted his spare time to painting, both in watercolour and oil, but entirely as a student. He trained himself in a way which seemed desultory to his friends, but it probably suited his idiosyncrasy.

In 1859 Walker joined the Artists' Society in Langham Chambers. From this time date the earliest attempts at original creation to which we can now point. His Langham sketches are numerous; they show a facility in composition and a felicity of accent not always to be discovered in his later work. By this time, too, he had become well known in professional circles as an illustrator and draughtsman for the wood engraver. Between the end of 1859 and the beginning of 1865 he did a mass of work of this kind, most of his drawings being ‘cut’ by Joseph Swain. These illustrations appeared in ‘Good Words,’ ‘Once a Week,’ ‘Everybody's Journal,’ the ‘Leisure Hour,’ and the ‘Cornhill Magazine,’ and show a constantly increasing sense of what this method of illustration requires. Walker's connection with the ‘Cornhill’ led to the most important friendship of his early years—that with Thackeray. He was employed by Swain to improve and adapt the novelist's own illustrations to his ‘Adventures of Philip,’ but, after a very few attempts in that direction, was asked by Thackeray to design the drawings ab initio, with nothing but the roughest of sketches to guide him. The result was excellent. The ‘Philip’ series ended in August 1862. During its progress Walker also produced a certain number of independent drawings mostly done on commission from the brothers Dalziel, which appeared in ‘Wayside Posies’ and ‘A Round of Days,’ published by Routledge. The most important of these drawings were ‘Charity,’ ‘The Shower,’ ‘The Mystery of the Bellows,’ ‘Winter,’ ‘Spring,’ ‘The Fishmonger,’ ‘Summer,’ ‘The Village School,’ ‘Autumn,’ and ‘The Bouquet.’ Six of them were afterwards repeated in colour. From the brothers Dalziel he also received his first commission of any importance, for a watercolour drawing—‘Strange Faces’—which dates from the end of 1862. After the conclusion of ‘Philip,’ Walker illustrated Miss Thackeray's ‘Story of Elizabeth’ in the ‘Cornhill,’ and made drawings, continually decreasing in number, for other periodicals. Thackeray's unfinished ‘Denis Duval’ was illustrated by him, but about 1865–6 he practically gave up illustration.

In 1863 he exhibited his first oil picture, ‘The Lost Path,’ at the Royal Academy.