Byam Shaw: First Years at St. John's Wood Art Schools

"The Prodigal's Return" by Byam Shaw

"It was at St. John's Wood Art Schools that my friendship with Byam Shaw began. I had just left Eton to begin my art training, and Shaw joined the schools in 1887.  In our early days there was no Life class - that came later. Our task was to draw from the Antique for five and a half days a week, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Attendance was registered and even a day off noted.

The big 'Antique' room was packed with girl and boy students, with the usual sprinkling of elderly folk, the girls outnumbering the boys by about ten to one. Silence was the order, and we were given printed rules for observation. One, I think, ran thus: 'Talking between male and female students is not allowed except in the rests, and then only on matters relating to art'!

Casts of the Hermes and Illyssus, Theseus, Venus, Caocoon, The Gladiator, Faun, and Discobolus were relieved with improvised backgrounds of white against a pale green distempered wall, wainscotted with wood of darker tint. On this hung a row of plaster cats - masks, and the separate features of the face fo Michelangelo's David, spaced by numerous busts set on pedestals.

As a newcomer, one stood awed by the reality of the highly stippled drawings produced by the older students, and I think the sole ambition of us all was some day to rival their realistic excellence. These prodigies of labour were evolved by an acquired manipulation of stumps and powdered chalk with 'sticky' or hard india-rubber. Their accuracy was the result of severe study of relative light and shade, the testing by plumbline and ruler, and seeking for knowledge of form through opera glasses.

We drew the casts in a set order. First, a fortnight was spent in imitating the light and shade of a cup and ball; followed by a cast of ornament in high relief. Next came six outlines and one drawing, of each of the features. After these, drawings of hands and feet, a mask, the head and bust, and, finally, a cast of the whole figure. For those who were being crammed, as it were, for the entrance exam, to the lower schools at the Royal Academy, the course was now complete, and they stretched their sheet of 'Double Elephant' Whatman paper ready for the three months of labour which were to be expended on it.

As a training for hard work the system was all for the good. No one, unless he was determined to be a painter and felt sure of himself, could have borne such incessant drudgery for one or two years without the intellectual relaxation that colours, a living model or composition could have given him."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Art & Life of Byam Shaw" by Rex Vicat Cole.)