Byam Shaw 1872-1919

Born in 1872 in Madras, India, while his father served as clerk of the High Court, Byam Shaw grew up in Kensington, England, where his family returned in 1878. Showing early aptitude for drawing, he was introduced at just fifteen to John Everett Millais, who recommended he enroll at the St John’s Wood Art School. There, he became friends with painters Gerald Fenwick Metcalfe (also born in India) and Rex Vicat Cole, and met the artist Evelyn Pyke-Nott, his future wife.

Shaw studied at the Royal Academy from 1890, winning the Armitage Prize in 1892 for The Judgment of Solomon. Directly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites and a fervent admirer of Rossetti’s poetry, he drew inspiration from the Old Masters and worked across a wide range of media, including oil, pastel, watercolor, pen and ink, tapestry, and gilding. Supported by London’s idealist circles, he exhibited frequently at the prestigious Dowdeswell & Dowdeswell’s Gallery on New Bond Street, holding at least five solo exhibitions between 1896 and 1916.

An educator as well, Shaw taught at King’s College, London from 1904 and, in 1910, founded a private academy, the Byam Shaw School of Art, together with his wife Evelyn and his friend Rex Vicat Cole. At the outbreak of World War I, Shaw enlisted with the Artists Rifles alongside Cole and produced wartime caricatures for newspapers. Deeply affected by the conflict, he died in 1919 of the Spanish flu at only 46 years old.

The work presented here, executed in a refined and complex technique combining watercolor, pastel, and gouache on paper, is closely related to Shaw’s illustrations for The Chiswick Shakespeare series, produced between 1899 and 1902. The subject, drawn from Hamlet's Ophelia, is paired with a signature in red capital letters carefully placed on a phylactery at the lower right, matching the calligraphy of that series. While this Shakespearean theme was a favorite among Pre-Raphaelites such as Millais and Rossetti for its tragic character, Byam Shaw distinguishes himself by an interpretation verging on surrealism. Ophelia’s face emerges from the water like an apparition, surrounded by water lilies, bathed in the last light of dusk or the first glow of moonlight. Her closed eyes suggest both sleep and death, while her half-smile oscillates between suffering and surrender, combining in this singular image all the elements of the Symbolist imagination.

[1] See the 1986 exhibition catalogue at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: Byam Shaw: A Selection of Paintings and Book Illustrations, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (2 September – 26 October 1986), Balding & Mansell, Wisbech, Camps, 1986.