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Winter 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).
Summer, a truly Pre-Raphaelite performance in its literalness and naive truth, presents two boys bathing in a pool overhung with trees. It has been pointed out that here we have the original motive out of which grew, first a water-colour in which the figures are more numerous and the design takes a more graceful shape, then one of the artist's most important works, The Bathers of 1867. — Claude Phillips, p. 21.
For a popular, highly illustrated poetry book, A Round of Days, Walker produced six illustrations, including Spring Days, Summer Days, and Autumn Days (1866). His engravers, the Dalziels, described this 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 seasonally-themed illustrations featuring children (perhaps based on his own brother and sister as they played near Cookham on the Thames) in their realisation of naturalistic details and dense composition reveal the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
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).
In this period, Walker often verges on sentimentality, but never quite fulfills that mid-Victorian expectation. The children in the A Round of Days, whether exuberant or reflective, although handsome, lack the kind of beauty that would render them precious. Moreover, the roughness of some of the backdrops, particularly that for Spring Days, challenges sentimental romanticism. However, the boy munching his bit of bread in Winter Days approaches that condition, as his timidity and the cold environment, as well as a lack of any companion and of vigorous activity such as one sees, in particular, in Summer Days, appeals to the viewer's tender sympathies. Nevertheless, the boy's tentativeness as he regards the ice that has formed below the pump enlists the viewer's critical appreciation of a realistic scene plausibly realised. The boy's heavy, fustian clothing and long hair complement the frozen spigot in suggesting the season, with a dusting of snow and ice at the boy's feet re-iterating the chill that pervades the scene. The overturned tub and well-used broom above imply that this is a season in which humanity stays within doors. In the midst of eating his crust of bread, the boy tentatively sets his foot upon the ice, as if unsure of his footing as he passes the familiar pump on his way out to play.
Left: The charming scene of children gathering flowers in a rural setting: Spring Days. Centre: Walker's wistful apple-picker: Autumn Days. Right: Walker offers a charming boyhood vignette for the warmest season: Summer 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 28 July 2018