Byam Shaw: The Byam Shaw & Vicat Cole Art School

Mr. Vicat Cole Posing a Model
for the Sketching Class

The author of this book, Rex Vicat Cole, writes: "Byam Shaw had now been teaching at King's College for six years, and myself much longer, so as the committee was disinclined to develop the Art department, we decided to resign and have an Art School of our own. To this end we built nice premises, designed by T. Phillips Figgis, in Kensington. On an afternoon in May 1910, our friends gathered round us, and The Byam Shaw and Vicat Cole Art School was opened and blessed by Sir William Richmond, R.A., and Mr. David Murray, R.A.

Admiring each other's work, sharing the same views on the educational and artistic value of teaching and agree in the methods to follow, we began a partnership that had no hitch or even divergence of opinion, but was a source of mutual pleasure, only ended by my friend's death, nine years later.

We set out to prepare students for the Royal Academy Schools, but so arranged things that most of them were much further advanced than was actually necessary for passing their examination. We gave an all-round training by drawing and painting from casts: the head and figure model, still-life, and sketch-model, posed with accessories under difficult effects of lighting, with the addition of painting in the country in the vacation. Pen-and-ink illustration, perspective, and anatomy also had definite places. The days work, from ten to six, went merrily, from the change of task, and students learnt the lesson of how to work hard, and the contentment that brings.

Shaw did not live to see in full the success of old students. His reward came to his friends in 1920, when old students gained nine of the fourteen medals awarded; again in 1921, with nine out of the sixteen medals, and in 1922, with six out of thirteen awarded; and these successes included knowledge of various subjects, in which we had always hoped the method of teaching might result.

We realized that artists are not made by art schools, and we were not out to encourage young people with merely a taste for drawing to enter the profession, with the probability of disillusionment later in life, but we also knew that a humble and faithful study of the things made by God and men is good for everyone, as a wonderful addition to the pleasures of life. One felt that everyone destined to be an artist would without a school fight his way to recognition, but would encounter unnecessary difficulties."

To be continued

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