Frederick
Walker, the son of a William Walker, a jeweller, was born in 1840.
After a brief education at the North London Collegiate School, Walker
found employment in an architect's office. Walker had always been
keen on drawing and for a short period in 1858 became a student at
the Royal Academy.
At the end of 1858 Walker became an apprentice to the wood engraver,
Josiah Wood. The following year Frederick Walker's engravings began
appearing in magazines including Good Words,
Once a Week and Everybody's
Journal. In 1860 William Makepeace
Thackeray began using his illustrations for his new journal, the
Cornhill Magazine. This included
the illustrations for Thackeray's novel, the Adventures
of Philip that was published in 1862.
In 1863 Frederick Walker exhibited his first oil paintings at the
Royal Academy. Most of these paintings
were reworking of engravings that Walker had produced for magazines.
One of these engravings that first appeared in Once a Week
in 1866 became the painting The Vagrants.
When the painting appeared at the Royal Academy
it failed to find a buyer. However, paintings such as the Wayfarers,
The Vagrants and The
Harbour of Refuge had a tremendous influence on young artists
such as Luke Fildes, Frank
Holl and Hubert von Herkomer.
By 1872 Walker, whose paintings showed a deep concern for the under-privileged,
was acknowledged as the leader of what became known as the social
realist school of painting. Frederick Walker suffered from poor health
throughout his life and died, aged thirty-five, in 1875.
Frederick
Walker, The Vagrants, Once a Week Magazine (1866)
(1)
In 1893 Hubert von Herkomer explained
the influence of Frederick Walker's paintings on his own work.
In Frederick Walker we have the creator of the English Renaissance,
for it was he who saw the possibility of combining the grace of the
antique with the realism of our everyday life in England. His navvies
are Greek gods, and yet not a bit less true to nature.
(2)
The Art Journal reviewed Frederick Walker's painting, The
Vagrants in 1868.
There is a pathos, a melancholy about these poor outcasts which awakens
compassion. Hearts of a brave humanity have these wanderers, though
rude in person and ragged of attire. Specially noble is the bearing
of the woman with arms folded and of countenance moodily meditative.
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