Byam Shaw: A Summary of His Art

"And who knoweth whether he shall be a
wise man or a fool? Yet shall he have
rule over all my labour wherein I have
laboured, and wherein I have showed
myself wise" by Byam Shaw

"What a prodigious and varied output in forty-six years of life, even for a man who 'believed in being busy' and whose motto was 'Try very hard'!

As a painter: From the age of twenty-one, when his first picture was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1893, Byam Shaw was represented there until his death in 1919, the only breaks in an otherwise consecutive run of twenty-six years being in 1915 and again in 1918, when he was too much occupied with war work to send anything. He also contributed pictures to the Royal Institute of Painters in Oils, the Royal Institute of Painter in Water-colour, and the  Pastel Society. The pictures comprising the four exhibitions by Messrs. Dowdeswell in Bond Street totalled a hundred and eighteen. There were also small pictures and portraits unexhibited and hundreds of sketches.

As an illustrator: His art as an illustrator was recognized by an unbroken series of important commissions from the age of twenty-five until his death, and his drawings for these books [about 26] must have well exceeded a thousand. 

As a teacher: Teaching during fifteen years of his life took up a good part of his time, and was carried on with as much enthusiasm as it would have been had he no other pursuits. 

Other branches of art: Shaw painted in oil, water-colour, in body-colour [gouache], and in tempera. His finished drawings were in pen-and-ink, pencil, pastel, and occasionally lithography. Other work comprised stained-glass designs, reredos and wall paintings, allegorical, political and war cartoons, posters, book plates, advertisements, and some designing of stage dresses and arrangement of tableaux. Shortly before his death he began etching and drypoint and experimenting in 'lino cuts'.

Frank Rutter in 'The Sunday Times' described Shaw's aesthetic this way: 'Byam Shaw was an artist who always commanded respect by the sincerity and integrity of his work. He was not a 'modern' as the word is now understood, but belongs by temperament and taste to the Pre-Raphaelite period, leaning towards the Rossetti rather than Millais and Holman Hunt side of the movement. His outlook was romantic, and his romance was tinged with medievalism... In considering his art, we must always think of him as a decorative painter who was born a little too late to find his just milieu.'"

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