Byam Shaw: Life Class

"Studies of Men and Women in Medieval Dress"
by Byam Shaw

"The innovation of a life-model was a great event. We trooped in and began our drawings with stumping-chalk and plumb-line, as we had been taught over the Antique casts! Soon charcoal found more favour, and that led to charcoal smeared, and worked over with a dry paint brush. The phase culminated with rubbing it with a rag, which created a superficial surface remarkably like flesh, though apt to be a trifle boneless. Shaw's drawings from Life were usually in Conté, rubbed, or in pure line. They showed exceptional thoroughness and accurate study of form, but little inspiration.

The Principals aimed at passing students into the Academy Schools after a short training, and they had success. Their only rival in the field was Cope's - the school run by Arthur Cope and Erskine Nichol. Very little beyond a realistic representation was attempted.

To the lower schools of the Academy a student had to submit drawings from the Antique. We sent them in at the appointed time, afterwards made enquiries of the Academy porter (as the custom was), only to hear we had failed to pass. Before Shaw tried again, an additional test, more to his liking, had been added - that of a head and arm, life-size, from the living model - and in 1890 he passed as probationer.

Some of the students of our time have entered different professions, others have followed various branches of art with success - most of them as figure-painters and draughtsmen. Among these are G. Spencer Watson, G. Stuart Davis, the late Allan Davidson, Gerald Metcalfe, Hugh Rivière, Lewis Baumer, Isabel Codrington and her elder sister, Mrs. Byam Shaw. Harry Dell and I have devoted ourselves to landscape, Benard Gribble to marine painting, and Roland Wheelwright almost entirely to animals. Teaching claimed Robinson and Sydney Evans."

To be continued

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