The Studio aug. 15. 1910

Előszó

Walter W. Russell
The paintings of walter
w. russell. b y c. h. collins baker.
Readers of The Studio lately have had oppor-tunity to make out something as to the nature and development of Wilson Steer's and Mr. Henry Tonks' art. It seems but the ordered sequence that a similar opportunity should follow as regards their colleague at the Slade School, their fellow-member of the New English Art Club, Mr. Walter Russell. Fifteen years it must be since he took up at the Slade, about two years later than Mr. Tonks, his post as assistant Professor of Drawing. Nor was he unheralded, seeing that with Mr. Tonks he had been a student at Westminster School of Art under Professor Brown, and that in that capacity he had impressed his fellow-pupil as a draughtsman of unusual mark.
To the School at Westminster Mr. Russell had gone on, it is legitimate to fancy, as to a pis aller. Or it may have been in the spirit of retaliation.
At any rate, he reached there, still smarting from his rejection, " on probation," from the Royal Academy Schools. By now, of course, it has become a sort of joke, the number and the quality of conspicuous artists whom this institution could not stomach, even as it is a perpetual mystery whither vanish the prize-winners of its competitions. But, then, for a brief attendance in the evening classes at South Kensington, Westminster was the first and last school in which Mr. Russell sat. From it he emerged with a remarkably fluent style of drawing and a conspicuous mastery of form. It may well be, I think, that he there had a direct influence upon his fellowstudent, Tonks, who, fresh from the hospitál, had arrived later. Leaving Westminster in 1S91 or so, Russell had no trouble in getting illustrative work, and until he became in 1895, at the age of 27, drawing master at the Slade and a member of the New English Art Club, his training for his future development as a painter chiefly had been in line. Turning over the drawings of that period one is impressed by Vissza