THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
07 BYAM SHAW
BYA M S HAW John Liston Byam Shaw, RI ROI ARWS (1872-1919) Byam Shaw was an astonishingly versatile artist of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, he worked variously as a painter, illustrator and cartoonist, and as a designer of stained glass, sets and costumes for the theatre, and even a tapestry for Morris & Co. Equipped with a strong sense of design and a bright palette, he was equally well suited to work in black and white and in colour. Enthusiastic and good-humoured, he was also able to communicate his many skills to others, becoming an influential teacher, and opening a school that long bore his name. Byam Shaw was born in ‘Ferndale’, a large house in Madras, India, on 13 November 1872. He was the third child and younger son of John Shaw, the Registrar of the High Court of Madras, and Sophia Alicia Byam Gunthorpe, second daughter of Captain John Houlton Gunthorpe of the Madras Horse Artillery. In 1878, he returned to England with his parents, his father practising as a solicitor. After a year in Bath, he lived at 103 Holland Road, Kensington, London, where he received a private education, including lessons in drawing from the painter and lithographer, John Alfred Vintner. His parents encouraged him in his drive to become an artist.
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On the death of his father in 1887, Shaw followed the advice of Sir John Everett Millais and studied art at St John’s Wood School of Art (1887-90), under its Principals, Abelardo Alvarez Calderón and Bernard Evans Ward, and also Thomas Edward Gaunt. It was there that he met his friends and fellow artists, Lewis Baumer, Rex Vicat Cole, Gerald Metcalfe and Evelyn Pyke-Nott, the last his future wife. Shaw then went on – with Baumer, Metcalfe and Pyke-Nott – to the Royal Academy Schools (1890-94). While there, he won the Armitage Prize in 1892 (for his painting, The Judgement of Solomon) and, in 1893, both the Academy Schools’ water-colour competition and two prizes at the Gilbert-Garret Competition for Sketching Clubs. Like Baumer and Metcalfe, he also contributed some humorous drawings to Comic Cuts and Illustrated Bits, and would continue to publish cartoons throughout his career. From 1893, Shaw and Metcalfe shared Whistler’s former studio at 95 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. In that year, he began to show paintings at the Royal Academy, the first being based on poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The influence of both the Pre-Raphaelites and the illustrators of the 1860s helped him to define his strong feeling for narrative, and he developed a career as a painter of literary, historical and allegorical subjects, as well as portraits. In 1897, Shaw took on his own, larger studio at 263 Warwick Road, which had once belonged to the grandfather of Rex Vicat Cole. He exhibited widely and held five solo shows with his dealer, Dowdeswell and Dowdeswell, between 1899 and 1908. He was elected to the membership of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours (1898) and the Royal Institute of Painters in Oils (1899), and later as an associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours (1913). Among the closest of his colleagues was the late Pre-Raphaelite painter, Eleanor FortescueBrickdale, whom he had met at the Royal Academy Schools, and who, like him, exhibited watercolours at Dowdeswell’s. Shaw’s sensitivity to literature opened his way to work as an illustrator of such classics as Poems by Robert Browning (1897), and such contemporary historical novels as H Rider Haggard’s