Fred Walker, the Tennyson of painting, was born in London in 1840, and had scarcely left school before the galleries of ancient art in the British Museum became his favourite place of resort. Drawings for wood-engraving were his first works, and with Millet in France he has the chief merit of having put fresh life into the traditional style of English wood engraving, so that he is honoured by the young school of wood-engravers as their lord and master. His first, and as yet unimportant, drawings appeared in 1860 in a periodical called _Once a Week_, for which Leech, Millais, and others also made drawings. Shortly after this _début_ he was introduced to Thackeray, then the editor of _Cornhill_, and he undertook the illustrations with Millais. In these plates he is already seen in his charm, grace, and simplicity. His favourite season is the tender spring, when the earth is clothed with young verdure, and the sunlight glances over the naked branches, and the children pluck the first flowers which have shot up beneath their covering of snow. His pictures give pleasure by virtue of the same qualities--delicacy of drawing, bloom of colouring, and a grace which is not affected in spite of its Grecian rhythm. [Illustration: _L'Art._ BOUGHTON. GREEN LEAVES AMONG THE SERE. (_By permission of the Artist._)] Walker was the first to introduce that delicate rosy red which has since been popular in English painting. His method of vision is as widely removed from that of Manet as from Couture's brown sauce. The surface of every one of his pictures resembles a rare jewel in its delicate finish: it is soft, and gives the sense of colour and of refined and soothing harmony. His first important work, "Bathers," was exhibited in 1867 at the Royal Academy, where works of his appeared regularly during the next five years. About a score of young people are standing on the verge of a deep and quiet English river, and are just about to refresh themselves in the tide after a hot August day. Some, indeed, are already in the water, while others are sitting upon the grass and others undressing. The frieze of the Parthenon is recalled, so plastic is the grace of these young frames, and the style and repose of the treatment of lines, which are such as may only be found in Puvis de Chavannes. In his next picture, "The Vagrants," he represented a group of gipsies camping round a fire in the midst of an English landscape. A mother is nursing her child, while to the left a woman is standing plunged in thought, and to the right a lad is throwing wood upon the faintly blazing fire. Here, too, the figures are all drawn severely after nature and yet have the air of Greek statues. There is no modern artist who has united in so unforced a manner actuality and fidelity to nature with "the noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" of the antique. In a succeeding picture of 1870, "The Plough," a labourer is striding over the ground behind the plough.