Biography (1840 - 75)
Header Photo: Marlow Ferry, (Detail)
Frederick Walker
Watercolor on paper, 29.2 × 45.1 cm
Towneley Hall Art Gallery and Museum
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© Estate of Frederick Walker
I'm trying to figure out just where on the river at Marlow this is. I've only been there once (beautiful place) so I'm assuming it's where the bridge is now but as far as I can remeber there's an old church on the right if you're looking up towards the town centre. Is that behind the bushes on the right. If so, then the houses on the left are long since gone and behind them is the big park with the Steve Redgrave statue.
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Frederick Walker ~ Biography
Frederick Walker, ARA RWS, artist. The evocations of rural life by Frederick Walker were greatly admired for their successful blend of simplicity, sentiment and pathos. For example, his Spring (1864, watercolour, 62.3 x 30.2 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London) depends for its naturalism on the artist's ability to paint in what Ruskin described as his 'semi minature, quarter fresco, quarter wash manner', a technique also described as 'working up a painting to a stage of extreme elaboration of drawing, to be afterwards carefully worn away, so that a suggestiveness and softness resulted - not emptiness, but veiled detail'.
He was regarded by many as the English artist whose career was most likely to lead to great things. He first worked as an illustrator, became one of the most popular illustrators of the 1860s, and was conscious of having missed out on academic training as an artist.
His wood engraving, The Vagrants was made for Once A Week in 1866. It depicted a family of dejected gypsies by the roadside. He reused the composition in an oil painting (83.2 x 126.4cm) of the same title which he exhibited the following year. That is now in Tate Britain, London.
It was to him the honour went of creating the first pictorial poster, his striking design for Wilkie Collin's novel The Woman in White (1871, poster, 217.2 x 128.9cm, Tate Britain, London).
In his day his work was greatly admired. No less than Van Gogh said of Walker and George John Pinwell in a letter of 1885: 'They did in England exactly what Maris, Israels, mauve, have done in Holland, namely restored nature over convention; sentiment and impression over academic platitudes and dullness...'
He was a regular exhibitor at the Dudley Gallery. Hubert von Herkomer (1849-1914) greatly admired his most famous painting, The Harbour of Refuge (1872, oil on canvas, 116.8 x 197.5cm. Tate Britain, London). It was first shown at the Royal Academy in 1872. As poetic in feel as you find anywhere in Victorian painting. It depicts a group of old people sitting in the garden of an almshouse (the Jesus Hospital at Bray), their age being contrasted with a vigorous young reaper, who symbolically wiields a scythe.
Before his early death Walker became known as the leader of a group which in the 1890s was retrospectively named the Idyllic School. It consisted primarily of illustrators who occasionally created watercolours, usually figurative subjects in landscape settings or domestic scenes. Others included George John Pinwell (1842-75) and John William North (1842-1924).
Source: Victorian Painting
Frederick Walker ~ Gallery
Just some of the magical works. I think his background as an illustrator really helped him to tell a story in a moment in a picture.
Frederick Walker
Marlow Ferry
Frederick Walker Fine Art Prints @ amazon.com (direct link)
© Estate of Frederick Walker
Frederick Walker
Spring
Frederick Walker Fine Art Prints @ amazon.com (direct link)
© Estate of Frederick Walker
Frederick Walker
The Harbour of Refuge
Frederick Walker Fine Art Prints @ amazon.com (direct link)
© Estate of Frederick Walker
Frederick Walker
Strange Faces
Frederick Walker Fine Art Prints @ amazon.com (direct link)
© Estate of Frederick Walker
Frederick Walker
The Woman in White, Poster for the stage version of
Frederick Walker Fine Art Prints @ amazon.com (direct link)
© Estate of Frederick Walker
Links
Frederick Walker: Biography Gallery
>> Victorian Painters Index
>>
Frederick Walker prints @ ebay.co.uk (direct link to prints) >>
Advertise >>
Frederick Walker Books and Dvds available @ amazon.com
