DOI issue:
No. 302 (May 1918)
DOI article:Image, Selwyn: W. Eyre Walker, R.W.S.
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21356#0122
W. Eyre Walker, R.JV.S.
may suppose, from the experience of his own
development, would Turner have been. For of
all sound art drawing is the basis : and the
two main factors in drawing are keenness of
intelligent vision and preciseness of vital
delineation. Well, at any rate so far as a
young student is concerned, there is for the
purpose of such delineation no instrument com-
parable with the pencil. The reason of this is
plain. It allows the student no seductive,
meretricious showiness. It ties him down to
accuracy, revealing at once where laziness or
incapacity have rendered his work faulty. Nay,
the very restraint it puts upon his emotion and
impatient ambition is at this stage in his
training of itself invaluable. For the develop-
ment of other qualities in his art he can bide
his time. But for the present let him be content
just to learn how to draw. Every day's painful
effort after that will reward him with a step in
advance. It is time spent and discipline sub-
mitted to of which no artist, whatever his
natural gift of originality and imagination, has
ever had cause to repent.
But his early apprenticeship to the pencil
under Harding's guidance, and his own natural
" love of the beauty of little things "—though
the salutary effect of both influences abides with
him to this day—have not injured Mr. Walker's
matured art in the direction of a too conven-
tional treatment of Nature, or of a finical
absorption in her exquisite, yet bewildering,
detail. Though, except in three of the drawings
here reproduced, one can convey to the reader
little idea of his admirable gift of colour—now
rich and solemn as in the Afternoon Sunshine on
the Galloway Hills, now tender and opalescent
as in A Surrey Canal: Evening—we have only
to turn to Hail Storms, or Lights and Shadows,
or Near Woodbridge, or On Galloway Moors, or
The River Torridge: Low Water, to see how wide
stretches of landscape appeal to the artist, and
with what a large vision and force of broad
handling he treats such subjects. In these
drawings, certainly—and they are eminently
characteristic ones—there is no smallness either
of conception or of touch. Once passed the
early student days it was " Turner's middle-
period drawings," Mr. Walker tells me, which
specially attracted him. Doubtless amongst
"OLD WILLOW STEMS'
Il6
WATER-COLOUR BY W. EYRE WALKER, R.W.S
may suppose, from the experience of his own
development, would Turner have been. For of
all sound art drawing is the basis : and the
two main factors in drawing are keenness of
intelligent vision and preciseness of vital
delineation. Well, at any rate so far as a
young student is concerned, there is for the
purpose of such delineation no instrument com-
parable with the pencil. The reason of this is
plain. It allows the student no seductive,
meretricious showiness. It ties him down to
accuracy, revealing at once where laziness or
incapacity have rendered his work faulty. Nay,
the very restraint it puts upon his emotion and
impatient ambition is at this stage in his
training of itself invaluable. For the develop-
ment of other qualities in his art he can bide
his time. But for the present let him be content
just to learn how to draw. Every day's painful
effort after that will reward him with a step in
advance. It is time spent and discipline sub-
mitted to of which no artist, whatever his
natural gift of originality and imagination, has
ever had cause to repent.
But his early apprenticeship to the pencil
under Harding's guidance, and his own natural
" love of the beauty of little things "—though
the salutary effect of both influences abides with
him to this day—have not injured Mr. Walker's
matured art in the direction of a too conven-
tional treatment of Nature, or of a finical
absorption in her exquisite, yet bewildering,
detail. Though, except in three of the drawings
here reproduced, one can convey to the reader
little idea of his admirable gift of colour—now
rich and solemn as in the Afternoon Sunshine on
the Galloway Hills, now tender and opalescent
as in A Surrey Canal: Evening—we have only
to turn to Hail Storms, or Lights and Shadows,
or Near Woodbridge, or On Galloway Moors, or
The River Torridge: Low Water, to see how wide
stretches of landscape appeal to the artist, and
with what a large vision and force of broad
handling he treats such subjects. In these
drawings, certainly—and they are eminently
characteristic ones—there is no smallness either
of conception or of touch. Once passed the
early student days it was " Turner's middle-
period drawings," Mr. Walker tells me, which
specially attracted him. Doubtless amongst
"OLD WILLOW STEMS'
Il6
WATER-COLOUR BY W. EYRE WALKER, R.W.S