James Walker (engraver)

Walker's earliest published plate bears the date 2 July 1780. During the following three years he published: portraits, after George Romney and others; domestic scenes, The Spell, and The Village Doctress, after James Northcote; a scene from Cymbeline, after Edward Penny.^[1]

Walker lost 24 of his plates in a shipwreck off Great Yarmouth, when he returned to England in 1802. A list of those was given in the catalogue of a sale of his remaining plates and impressions from the lost plates, at Sotheby's, on 29 November 1822. A portrait of Alexander I was published after his return, on 1 May 1803.^[1]

A number of Walker's mezzotints were published for the first time in 1819, and one, The Triumph of Cupid, after Parmigianino, in 1822.^[1]

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Attribution

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Lee, Sidney, ed. (1899). "Walker, James (1748-1808?)". Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 59. London: Smith, Elder & Co.

• Alan Bird, 'James Walker: A British Engraver in St Petersburg' in British Art Treasures from Russian Imperial Collections in the Hermitage, edited by B. Allen and L. Dukelskaya, New Haven, CT, 1996
• A. G. Cross, Engraved in the Memory: James Walker, Engraver to the Empress Catherine the Great, and his Russian Anecdotes, Oxford and Providence, 1993
• Ekaterina Skvortcova, 'New Facts about James Walker in Russia', Print Quarterly, Vol. XXXII, No. 3 (September 2015), pp. 270–293