DOI Heft:
No. 302 (May 1918)
DOI Artikel:Image, Selwyn: W. Eyre Walker, R.W.S.
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21356#0119
IV. Eyre Walker, R.IV.S.
W. EYRE WALKER, R.W.S. BY
PROFESSOR SELWYN IMAGE
MR. EYRE WALKER has been an
Associate of the Old Water-Colour
Society for now close on forty
years : for over twenty he has been
a Full Member. His work, therefore, is well
known to all frequenters of that delightful
gallery in Pall Mall. By how many of us in the
annual exhibitions there is it always—may I
say affectionately ?—looked out for and wel-
comed. For assuredly, when found, it never
fails to exert over us that intimate peaceful
charm we have grown to associate with his
accomplished art.
Let me here quote a too modest passage from
a note written me by Mr. Walker, which reveals
to us what in his pictures is their general
purpose. " I try," he says, " to take my
minute, nebulous, interested public to look at
my landscape with me, and to tell them what
I see in it as gracefully and fittingly as I can."
Precisely. That puts the matter for us in a
nutshell. Unlike so much contemporary work
his aim is not to startle and set us arguing : it
is not, in Shakespeare's telling phrase, " to
change true rules for odd inventions." And
herein, I venture to submit, he proves himself
to be of the genuine stock and in the true tradi-
tion of his famous Society. Well, certainly it
is not a little gratitude that we owe to this
tradition—the tradition, that is, of sound rather
than of showy workmanship having for its end
the expression above all else in Art of Beauty
and Fine Interest.
In our modern lawless days, however, this
tradition meets with an acceptance by no means
universal. Here, for example, is a charac-
teristic quotation from a notice of one of the
Society's recent exhibitions by a well-known
critic in one of our leading newspapers. " The
present exhibition," it runs, " is rather above
the average, although there is not much audacity
in it, and a general fear of ugliness." Damning
with faint praise this beyond all question!
Yet one knows by experience what effusive
laudation would in certain quarters have been
expended on the exhibition supposing it had
consisted of examples of affected childishness in
"night" water-colour by w. eyre walker, r.w.s.
(In the possession of Mrs. A. W. Wills)
LXXIII. No. 302.—May 1918 113
W. EYRE WALKER, R.W.S. BY
PROFESSOR SELWYN IMAGE
MR. EYRE WALKER has been an
Associate of the Old Water-Colour
Society for now close on forty
years : for over twenty he has been
a Full Member. His work, therefore, is well
known to all frequenters of that delightful
gallery in Pall Mall. By how many of us in the
annual exhibitions there is it always—may I
say affectionately ?—looked out for and wel-
comed. For assuredly, when found, it never
fails to exert over us that intimate peaceful
charm we have grown to associate with his
accomplished art.
Let me here quote a too modest passage from
a note written me by Mr. Walker, which reveals
to us what in his pictures is their general
purpose. " I try," he says, " to take my
minute, nebulous, interested public to look at
my landscape with me, and to tell them what
I see in it as gracefully and fittingly as I can."
Precisely. That puts the matter for us in a
nutshell. Unlike so much contemporary work
his aim is not to startle and set us arguing : it
is not, in Shakespeare's telling phrase, " to
change true rules for odd inventions." And
herein, I venture to submit, he proves himself
to be of the genuine stock and in the true tradi-
tion of his famous Society. Well, certainly it
is not a little gratitude that we owe to this
tradition—the tradition, that is, of sound rather
than of showy workmanship having for its end
the expression above all else in Art of Beauty
and Fine Interest.
In our modern lawless days, however, this
tradition meets with an acceptance by no means
universal. Here, for example, is a charac-
teristic quotation from a notice of one of the
Society's recent exhibitions by a well-known
critic in one of our leading newspapers. " The
present exhibition," it runs, " is rather above
the average, although there is not much audacity
in it, and a general fear of ugliness." Damning
with faint praise this beyond all question!
Yet one knows by experience what effusive
laudation would in certain quarters have been
expended on the exhibition supposing it had
consisted of examples of affected childishness in
"night" water-colour by w. eyre walker, r.w.s.
(In the possession of Mrs. A. W. Wills)
LXXIII. No. 302.—May 1918 113