y first love was painting, and strange to say, a very early effort, ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (again) found a place in the Academy Exhibition of 1862.
This brought me a patron, a Scotchman too, who actually gave me further commissions, and I went on painting small pictures, illustrative of Keats and Tennyson, for this gentleman, for two or three years, until, my modest efforts being steadily refused at the almost only door of a painter’s opportunity, the R.A., I suppose he got tired, although I did not, but continued to carry on painting, with my book-work, and worked at life study in the evenings at “Heatherleys.”
The opening of the Dudley Gallery as a general exhibition of water-colour drawings in 1866, gave a new opportunity of exhibiting pictorial work, and I had a drawing accepted, and continued to exhibit there every year until its dissolution or part absorption into the Institute in Piccadilly. [1-2]
Bibliography
The Work of Walter Crane with Notes by the Artist. The Easter Art Annual for 1898: Extra Number of the “Art Journal”. London: J. S. Virtue, 1898. Internet Archive version of a copy in the Getty Art Institute. Web. 3 January 2018.
Last modified 27 June 2020