Frederick Walker

He is often regarded as the founder of the Idyllic school in Victorian painting, though that term was not coined until after his death. Among other stylistic trends of his period he sometimes displayed social realism and genre painting sentimentality. • Illustration — Spring, watercolour, 1864, now Walker's best-known painting, Victoria and Albert Museum

The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is visual arts. Places of work recorded in the authority are London. Works named in the authority record are The Vagrants. Work by Frederick Walker is recorded in the collections of National Gallery of Victoria, Auckland Art Gallery, Tate, National Gallery and Fitzwilliam Museum.

Walker was born at 90 Great Titchfield Street in London as one of eight children: the elder of twins and fifth son of William Henry, jeweller, and Ann (née Powell) Walker. His grandfather, William Walker, had been an artist, who exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy and British Institution in 1782–1802. Fredrick's mother was an embroiderer and became the family's main breadwinner when his father died in 1847. Walker received his education at a local school and later at the North London Collegiate School in Camden. He showed a talent for art from an early age, teaching himself to copy prints using pen and ink. He also practised drawing in the British Museum. In 1855–1857, he worked in an architect's office in Gower Street, but he gave this up to become a student at the British Museum and at James Mathews Leigh's art school. In March 1858 he was admitted as a student to the Royal Academy, and later that year became also a part-time apprentice wood-engraver to Josiah Wood Whymper in Lambeth, soon abandoning his Academy classes. During the two years of his apprenticeship he met fellow artists J. W. North and George Pinwell, and he continued to paint in his spare time, in oils and watercolours.

• Illustration — The Old Farm Garden, watercolour, 1871, Courtauld Institute of Art • Illustration — The Vagrants, oils, 1868, Tate Britain Walker produced his first important watercolour, Strange faces in 1862 (now Yale Center for British Art, New Haven), and in the following year Philip in Church (Tate), which won a medal at the Paris Exhibition of 1867. Walker exhibited at the Royal Watercolour Society from 1864 until the end of his life, becoming an associate member in February 1864 and a full member in 1866, entitling him to add the post-nominal initials RWS to his name. In 1871 he was elected an Associate Royal Academician (ARA), and was elected an honorary member of the Belgian Watercolour Society in the same year. In 1863 Walker exhibited his first oil painting, The Lost Path at the Royal Academy of Arts. Thereafter he showed Wayfarers (1866, private collection), The Bathers (1867, Lady Lever Art Gallery), Vagrants (1868, Tate, London), The Old Gate (1869; Tate), The Plough (1870; Tate), At the Bar (1871; Untraced), The Harbour of Refuge (1872; Tate, also with a watercolour study there) and The Right of Way (1875; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne). In the final phase of his painting he moved towards a classical treatment of both groups of figures and individual ones, seen in The Bathers of 1867, and The Harbour of Refuge 1872, both large, wide oils, though he repeated the latter in watercolour. • Watercolours • Illustration — The Mussel Gatherer, 1861, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven • Illustration — Strange faces, 1862, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven • Illustration — A Fishmonger's Shop, repetition of 1873 painting, Walters Art Museum • Illustration — Marlow Ferry, Towneley Hall Art Gallery and Museum

• Illustration — The Bathers (1866–67), oils, Lady Lever Art Gallery • Illustration — The Harbour of Refuge, 1872, oils, Tate • Illustration — Cookham memorial Walker never married, spending his life in London with family members: his brother John (died 1868), his sister Fanny (died 1876) and his mother (died 1874). They resided in Bayswater from 1863. He twice visited Paris in 1863 and 1867, and Venice in 1868 and 1870, in the latter case with a friend, William Quiller Orchardson. In 1873 he travelled to Algiers in a failed attempt to recuperate from a bout of tuberculosis that worsened until his death in June 1875 at St Fillans in Perthshire, Scotland. He was buried at Cookham.