The same year he moved from Charles Street, Manchester Square, to No. 3 St. Petersburgh Place, Bayswater, which he occupied for the rest of his life. In 1863 he painted one of his most famous watercolours, ‘Philip in Church;’ and among smaller things, the ‘Young Patient,’ ‘The Shower,’ and ‘The Village School.’ He was greatly affected by Thackeray's death, which took place at Christmas. Six weeks later, on 8 Feb. 1864, he was unanimously elected an associate of the ‘Old Watercolour’ Society, his trial pieces being ‘Philip in Church,’ ‘Jane Eyre,’ and ‘Refreshment.’ At the ensuing exhibition he was represented by these three drawings and by ‘Spring.’ In 1864 he exhibited ‘Denis's Valet’ and ‘My Front Garden’ (called ‘Sketch’ in the Catalogue); in 1865 ‘Autumn,’ and in 1866 ‘The Bouquet,’ sending also various less important things—‘The Introduction,’ ‘The Sempstress,’ ‘The Spring of Life’—to the winter exhibitions. During these years he was unrepresented at the Royal Academy, but in 1866 his ‘Wayfarers’—on the whole perhaps the most successful of his oil pictures—was exhibited at Mr. Gambart's gallery. In 1867 he made his reappearance at the Royal Academy with the large oil picture of ‘Bathers,’ formerly owned by Sir Cuthbert Quilter, bart., which was followed in 1868 by ‘Vagrants,’ now in the National Gallery; in 1869 by ‘The Old Gate,’ which belonged to Mr. A. E. Street; and in 1870 by ‘The Plough,’ which was owned by the Marquis de Misa. In 1871—the year of his election as an A.R.A. and as an honorary member of the Belgian Watercolour Society—he sent ‘At the Bar’ to Burlington House; in 1872 ‘The Harbour of Refuge,’ and in 1875, the year of his death, ‘The Right of Way.’ His contributions to the Royal Academy were only seven in number. Between 1868 and his death he was represented by some twenty-two drawings at the ‘Old Watercolour’ Society's, including ‘Lilies,’ ‘The Gondola,’ ‘The First Swallow,’ ‘In a Perthshire Garden,’ ‘The Ferry,’ ‘Girl at the Stile,’ ‘The Housewife,’ ‘The Rainbow;’ watercolour versions of ‘Wayfarers,’ ‘The Harbour of Refuge,’ and ‘The Old Gate,’ and by the famous ‘Fishmonger's Shop.’ To the Dudley Gallery he sent a small sketch or replica, in oil, of ‘At the Bar,’ and the cartoon for a poster, ‘The Woman in White,’ which may be said to have started the fashion of artistic advertising in this country. Some of his better drawings—‘The Wet Day,’ for instance—were never exhibited during his life.
Apart from his art, Walker's life was uneventful. He was never married, and lived with his brother John—who died, however, in 1868—his sister Fanny, and his mother. He twice visited Paris—in 1863, with Philip Henry Calderon; and in 1867, the exhibition year, with W. C. Phillips. In 1868 he travelled to Venice by sea, seeing Genoa by the way; two years later he paid a second visit, and spent a fortnight among the canals with his friend William Quiller Orchardson. On this occasion he reached Venice by way of Munich, Innsbruck, and Verona. But his imperfect education had left him unprepared to enjoy or appreciate foreign places, and his letters are strangely deficient in allusions to anything connected with art. In December 1873 he visited Algiers to recruit his health. After his return his condition improved, and during the autumn and winter of 1874 and spring of 1875 he finished the drawing known as ‘The Rainbow,’ worked on a picture of ‘Mushroom Gatherers,’ which was never finished, and completed his last oil picture, ‘The Right of Way,’ now in the gallery at Melbourne. He died at St. Fillans, Perthshire, at the house of Mr. H. E. Watts, on 4 June 1875. His mother had died in the previous November, and his sister Fanny followed him in September 1876. All three were buried at Cookham, where a medallion by H. H. Armstead has been put up in the church to the painter's memory.
No record of Walker's life would be complete without a note on his friendships and on his curious love of certain sports. He was an enthusiastic fisherman, and at one time a bold rider to hounds. Among his close friends were Thackeray, Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, the Birket-Fosters, G. D. Leslie, Orchardson, Sir John Millais, Arthur Lewis, Sir W. Agnew, and especially J. W. North.
As to his art, few painters have been so sincere and personal as Walker. From first to last his one aim was to realise his own ideas and express his own emotions. Here and there an outside influence can be traced in his work, but the modifications it causes are accidental rather than essential. Echoes of the Elgin marbles can be recognised in a few over-graceful rustics; both Millais and Millet had an effect upon his manner; but the passion which informs his work is entirely his own. His sympathies were rather deep than wide, so that he succeeded better when he had but one thing to say than when he had two or three. His earlier designs, when both data and method were simple, have a unity, balance, and coherence scarcely to be found in his later and more ambitious conceptions. Less perhaps than the works of any other artist of equal
