Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 59.djvu/147

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Wallis
141
Wallis

of Art, p. 45). The royal commissioners for the Great Exhibition of 1851 appointed him a deputy commissioner, and he acted in 1850 for several manufacturing districts and the whole of Ireland. During the exhibition of 1851 he was superintendent of the British textile division, and a deputy commissioner of juries. After the close of the exhibition he accepted, at the request of the board of trade, the headmastership of the Birmingham school of design. In 1853 he was one of the six commissioners sent by the government to the United States of America to report on art and manufactures, and from his report and that of Sir Joseph Whitworth [q. v.] on machinery was compiled ‘The Industry of the United States,’ 1854. During the great International Exhibition of 1862 he acted in the same capacity as he had done in 1851. He was actively engaged in the British section of the Paris universal exhibitions of 1855 and 1867. In 1858 he left Birmingham and joined the South Kensington Museum as senior keeper of the art collection, an appointment which he relinquished just prior to his death. He fostered the system of circulating works of art in provincial museums. On 7 March 1878 he was elected F.S.A. He wrote in all the leading art periodicals, and was one of the earliest contributors to the ‘Art Journal,’ besides delivering a vast number of lectures on design and kindred subjects. He died at 21 St. George's Road, Wimbledon, Surrey, on 24 Oct. 1891, and was buried in Highgate cemetery on 28 Oct. He married, on 30 June 1842, Matilda, daughter of William Cundall of Camberwell, and left issue.

Besides prefaces to artistic works he wrote:

  1. ‘On the Cultivation of a Popular Taste in the Fine Arts,’ 1839.
  2. ‘The Principles of Art as applied to Design,’ 1844.
  3. ‘Introductory Address delivered to the Students of the Manchester School of Design,’ 1844.
  4. ‘The Industry of the United States in Machinery and Ornamental Art,’ 1844.
  5. ‘The Artistic and Commercial Results of the Paris Exhibition,’ 1855.
  6. ‘Recent Progress of Design,’ 1856.
  7. ‘Schools of Art, their Constitution and Management,’ 1857.
  8. ‘Wallis's Drawing Book, Elementary Series,’ 1859.
  9. ‘The Manufactures of Birmingham,’ 1863.
  10. ‘The Royal House of Tudor,’ 1866.
  11. ‘Technical Instruction,’ 1868.
  12. ‘Language by Touch,’ 1873.
  13. ‘Decorative Art in Britain, Past, Present, and Future,’ 1877.
  14. ‘British Art, Pictorial, Decorative, and Industrial: a Fifty Years' Retrospect,’ 1882.

He edited Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins's ‘Comparative Anatomy as applied to the Purposes of the Artist,’ 1883.

[Art Journal, December 1891, p. 384, with portrait; Daily Graphic, 28 Oct. 1891, with portrait; Illustrated London News, 17 Oct. 1891, with portrait; London Figaro, 14 Oct. 1891, with portrait; Magazine of Art, December 1891, with portrait; Biograph, 1879, ii. 177; Simms's Bibliotheca Staffordiensis, pp. 484–6.]

G. C. B.

WALLIS, JOHN (1616–1703), mathematician, was born at Ashford in Kent on 23 Nov. 1616. His father, the Rev. John Wallis (1567–1622), son of Robert Wallis of Finedon, Northamptonshire, graduated B.A. and M.A. from Trinity College, Cambridge, and was minister at Ashford from 1602 until his death on 30 Nov. 1622. He married in 1612, as his second wife, Joanna, daughter of Henry and Mary Chapman of Godmersham, Kent, and had by her three daughters and two sons, John and Henry.

Wallis's education was begun at Ashford; but, on an outbreak there of the plague, he was removed in 1625 to a private school at Ley Green, near Tenterden, kept by James Mouat, a Scot. When it broke up in 1630 Wallis ‘was as ripe for the university,’ by his own account, ‘as some that have been sent thither.’ ‘It was always my affectation even from a child,’ he wrote, ‘not only to learn by rote, but to know the grounds or reasons of what I learn; to inform my judgment as well as furnish my memory.’ When placed in 1630 at Felsted school, Essex, he wrote and spoke Latin with facility, knew Greek, Hebrew, French, logic, and music. During the Christmas vacation of 1631 his brother taught him the rules of arithmetic, and the study ‘suited my humour so well that I did thenceforth prosecute it, not as a formal study, but as a pleasing diversion at spare hours,’ when works on the subject ‘fell occasionally in my way. For I had none to direct me what books to read, or what to seek, or in what method to proceed. For mathematics, at that time with us, were scarce looked on as academical studies, but rather mechanical—as the business of traders, merchants, seamen, carpenters, surveyors of lands, and the like.’ He was admitted to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, at Christmas 1632, gained a scholarship on the foundation, and became noted as a dialectician. His course of study embraced ethics, physics, and metaphysics, besides medicine and anatomy; he being the first pupil of Francis Glisson [q. v.] to maintain publicly the circulation of the blood. He graduated B.A. and M.A. in 1637 and 1640 respectively, was ordained in the latter year, and became chaplain, first to Sir Richard Darley at Buttercrambe, Yorkshire, then (1642–4) to the widow of Horatio, lord Vere,