[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> Frederick Walker —> Next]
Autumn Days
Fred Walker
1866
Wood-engraving by the Dalziels
height 16.2 cm x width 12.1 cm
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham
Although Walker is now principally remembered as an Idyllist painter, he provided six seasonal drawings (such as Summer Days) for the Dalziel brothers (George, Edward, and Thomas) which appeared in two poetry books, A Round of Days Described in Original Poems (1866) and Wayside Posies; Original Poems of Country Life (1874).
Walker produced six illustrations, including Spring Days, Summer Days, and Autumn Days (1866), for a popular, highly illustrated poetry book, A Round of Days (cover design). His engravers and publishers, the Dalziel brothers, described this book as a compendium of "every-day scenes, occurrences and incidents." So successful were sales of the volume of idyllic illustrations that the Dalziels re-issued parts of the original book as Pictures Posies (1874) and English Rustic Pictures (1882). Walker's autumn illustration, like its spring counterpart, reveals the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in its realisation of naturalistic details and dense composition.
Percy Muir explains that the Dalziel brothers commissioned the illustrations by Walker that ended up in A Round of Days for a companion volume “to Birket Foster's English Landscape and all the drawings were to have been by Walker” (141). When he completed only eleven, they used them for the 1866 volume and Wayside Posies (1867). George Pinwell (1842-75) contributed seventeen illustrations, but “both it and Wayside Posies (1867) have a further glory for the 24 beautiful drawings by J. W. North, five in the first and 19 in the second. These include some of his best work” (141-42).
All four parts of Walker's Round of Days achieve the Pre-Raphaelite beauty of human form and natural backdrop, although the built environment looms larger in the final panel celebrating winter. Spring Days combines a complex description of the outdoor setting with an exquisitely drawn child picking flowers. The wistfulness of the female apple-picker in Autumn Days likewise suggests an inner life, subtly engaging the viewer with a sense of col tempo. On the other hand, the remaining seasons in the sequence, which lack this emotional intensity, instead focus on boyhood activity. Walker has balanced the set with complementary portraits of two girls in stasis and two boys in action. Whereas the personification of Spring pauses in her gathering of flowers and Autumn directly regards the viewer, the boys, who represent Summer and Winter, so completely engage in their seasonal activities, whether swimming in a pond lined with reeds in Summer Days, and testing the ice made by the dripping of the water upon the ground in Winter Days, that they do not regard the viewer at all. Thus, the young males seem to represent a life of action, and the females a life of contemplation, although the boy on the bank in Summer Days momentarily pauses as he considers diving in, and the child outdoors in the cold air in Winter Days is tentative rather than definite in stepping on the icy ground. "The design of Winter is more restricted and prosaic in conception; it gives us, much as one of William Hunt's water-colours have done, only with a certain pensiveness in lieu of jollity, a boy standing at a frozen pump, with a half-bitten piece of bread-and-butter in his hand" (Phillips, p. 21).
"Autumn shows a girl in an orchard, standing under a still leafy apple-tree laden with fruit; one of these she has plucked and holds in her hand" (Phillips, p. 21). The painting of the same name suffers by comparison. "The Autumn is already a little over-studied in the first rendering; its expressiveness cannot be said to be enhanced in the subsequent and more elaborate version" (Phillips, p. 21), the painting of the same title showing an adolescent girl depressed and perhaps daydreaming or even sleeping, striking a slightly Pre-Raphaelite pose on a tree branch. In place of the simple figure of the elderly male worker in Autumn Days, in the painting Autumn (1865), Walker juxtaposes overblown flowers and yellowing leaves. The dual focus of the adolescent fruit-picker and the apple tree more effectively exemplifies Walker's Idyllistic manner: "The Idyllists painted from nature, out of doors. In the best of their work Walker, Pinwell and North seem to capture a single moment in time and yet with it, all eternity" (Milton). Walker here captures "the single moment" in which summer transitions into autumn, and in which careless childhood transitions into thoughtful young adulthood.
In the scene representative of the fall, most of the apples still hang on the tree, which still possesses its leaves, but the stiff wind blowing through the girl's hair and clothing and agitating the undergrowth reminds the viewer that, if the children are already harvesting the summer fruit, winter cannot be far off. Suitably, too, makes the wistful apple-picker's companion an elderly worker rather than a vivacious boy. Although the holds a mere apple, it may signify a moment of wisdom beyond her years, as if in a trance she realizes the change of season connects the natural rhythms of the seasons with her own mortality. Her steadfastly gazing at the viewer challenges the one studies this picture to consider his or her own mortality.
Left: The charming scene of children gathering flowers in a rural setting: Spring Days. Centre: Walker's depicting boys swimming in a narrative illustration: Summer Days. Right: Walker offers a charming boyhood vignette for the coldest season: Winter Days. [Click on images to enlarge them.]
Muir, Percy. Chapter 6, "The Dalziel Era." Victorian Illustrated Books. London: B. T. Batsford, 1971. Pp. 129-148.
Phillips, Claude. Frederick Walker and His Works. London: Seeley & Co., 1905.
Walker, Fred. "Spring Days" from the Tate Britain Collection. Google Arts and Culture, 1866. Online version available from The Tate Britain. Web. 11 July 2018.
Last modified 27 July 2018