1861 - 1939

Sculptor, painter and mosaicist. Born in Hackney, London, he attended the Royal Academy Schools (1883-88). His early work for architects was not confined to sculpture. As well as sculpting the four evangelist symbols (1895) for the tower of the Church of the Ark of the Covenant (now Good Shepherd) in Upper Clapton, London, and a frieze of racehorses for the mantelpiece of a house in Stratton Street, Piccadilly, for the architect Harold Cooper, he also designed mosaics for the Greek Church in Bayswater, and for Whitelands College, Chelsea. Occasionally, also, he exhibited paintings at the Royal Academy. He began to exhibit sculpture there in 1884, but an important early group, entitled And They Were Afraid, representing Adam and Eve after the Fall, was not shown there. Illustrated by Marion Spielmann in British Sculpture and Sculptors of Today (1901), it shows the influence of Paris Salon sculpture. Walker used Donatellesque low relief in such works as the Death of the Firstborn (1897) and Paradise Lost (1903). In 1905-6 he executed figures of Roger Payne and William Morris for the Exhibition Road façade of the Victoria and Albert Museum. His first important commission for a public memorial was the Florence Nightingale (1914) in Waterloo Place, London. Later ones were the Emmeline Pankhurst (1930) for Victoria Tower Gardens, London, and an equestrian John Wesley (1932) for the Wesleyan Chapel, Broad Mead, Bristol. Walker’s World War I memorials include that at St Anne’s, Limehouse, London, (1921), with its statue of the Blessing Christ, and a relief of no-man’s land, and that at Shrewsbury School (1923), with its statue of the Salopian old-boy, Sir Philip Sidney. Others are at Derby, Bury St Edmunds and Hawarden. In the 1920s and 30s Walker exhibited a number of works combining ivory and marble. He was a member of the Art Workers Guild from 1892, and became a full RA in 1936.