LUCY WALKER

'The National Gallery. The Students Annual Exhibition', The Argus, Melbourne, 13 November 1888, p. 8
Daily Telegraph, 14 August 1888, p. 6
Table Talk, 16 November 1888, p. 14
Patricia Grassick, 'Interiors in Australian painting in the 1880s', Art and Australia, vol. 21, no. 3, Autumn 1984, pp. 346-51, p. 349, illus.
Patricia Grassick, 'Lucy Walker: the road to Heidelberg', Art and Australia, vol. 22, no. 3, Autumn 1985, pp. 357

Lucy Walker's story 'runs like a thread' through what is now seen as one of the most creative periods of Australian art - and perhaps the most romantic.¹ Her work is very rare and The Little Waif is considered the most important of her surviving paintings. A student at the National Gallery of Victoria's art school alongside Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder, Emanuel Phillips Fox, David Davies, Jane Sutherland and other leading figures in the Australian impressionist movement, she was a model for John Longstaff and Tom Roberts. While Streeton was nicknamed 'Smike' by his artist friends, and Roberts was 'Bulldog', Lucy Walker is called 'Alf' in Streeton's letters - possibly for her love of the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Streeton was in love with her younger sister Florence - or Florry. Indeed secret inscriptions have recently been discovered scratched into the paint of one of his Eaglemont landscapes: 'Florry/Smike' and 'Florry Walker is my sweetheart'.²

In 1889 Lucy married the owner of the old homestead on Mount Eagle where the most famous Australian impressionist painters set up their artist camps and became popularly known as the 'Heidelberg School'. Her father, Joseph Henry Walker, had arrived in Adelaide in 1849, moved to Victoria during the Gold Rush and, having failed to make his fortune on the Bendigo diggings, become a successful builder and contractor. By the time of the 1880s land boom, he had settled his family in Northcote, not far from Heidelberg. Lucy Amelia, the fourth of his nine children, spent eight years at the National Gallery School from 1880. In 1882 she moved up from the Drawing School, where she was taught by Frederick McCubbin, to the Painting School under George Folingsby, where she was reportedly an excellent student and won prizes for her work several years in a row.

The influence of both her teachers can be seen in The Little Waif. The dim interior, with its finely painted figures telling a poignant story, is typical of the narratives of pioneering life encouraged by Folingsby. The setting is reminiscent of McCubbin's Home Again of 1884 (National Gallery of Victoria); whilst the subject matter calls to mind a very popular - if rather sentimental - work purchased by the Gallery in 1886, The Mitherless Bairn by the Scottish painter Thomas Faed. The setting has been identified as the kitchen of the Eaglemont homestead, where the impressionist group were then camping and painting. It suggests a nostalgia for the recent pioneering past, rather than the grinding poverty of the old world depicted by Faed.³  Lucy Walker was also conscious of Longstaff's great success just a year before with his scholarship winning Breaking the News (Art Gallery of Western Australia), which incorporated a number of the same studio props. As described by one admiring reviewer in Table Talk, 'In The Little Waif some careful character work is shown, and the attitude of the old woman as she bends over the sick child is extremely natural'.⁴

In July 1888 Lucy Walker was elected a member of the Victorian Artists' Society but after her marriage in October the following year to Charles Martyn Davies she painted much less prolifically. The newlyweds moved to a big bluestone house called 'Carn' on the next hill to Mount Eagle, where Streeton was a regular visitor. He also went often to the house at Gembrook where Lucy and Florry's father had retired.⁵  
Lucy and Charles Davies moved their young family into the old Mount Eagle house from about 1894, after the Heidelberg group of painters had dispersed, and lived there until it was demolished to make way for their new house on the site after the turn of the century.

1. Grassick, P., 'Lucy Walker: the road to Heidelberg', Art and Australia, vol. 22, no. 3, Autumn 1985, p. 357
2. Discovered by the Michael Varcoe-Cocks, paintings conservator at the National Gallery of Victoria, on Streeton's Spring, 1890; see Terence Lane et al., Australian Impressionism, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2007, cat. 7.8, p. 136; and The Age, 13 June 2007, pp. 5, 16 
3. Grassick, P., 'Interiors in Australian painting in the 1880s', Art and Australia, vol. 21, no. 3, Autumn 1984, pp. 350-1
4. Table Talk, 16 November 1888, p. 14 
5. For Streeton's painting of this house see Residence of J. Walker Esq., Gembrook, 1888 (National Gallery of Victoria), in Lane, op. cit., cat. 9.65, p. 179