(b Madras, 13 Nov 1872; d London, 26 Jan 1919). Painter, draughtsman and teacher. He studied at the St John's Wood Art School (1887-90), London, and in 1890 entered the Royal Academy Schools, where he won the Armitage Prize. He soon produced many pen-and-ink drawings for ephemera and later several series of watercolours and line drawings for such books as Poems by Robert Browning (London, 1897) and Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth (London, 1909). Critics praised his paintings, such as the Blessed Damosel (1894-5; London, Guildhall A.G.), for their skilful colouring and romantic compositions, which owe much to the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites. (An almost Pre-Raphaelite intensity is still evident in the detailed depiction of the natural world in the Boer War, 1900 (1901; Birmingham, Mus. & A.G.).) But he was soon criticized for the awkward juxtaposition of the real and the imagined in such religious paintings as Christ the Comforter (exh. RA 1896; Adelaide, A.G. S. Australia), which seemed to contemporaries increasingly dated. Always particularly striking, however, were his full-length portraits of his family, for example that of his fianc?e, Evelyn Pyke-Nott (1898; London, N. Byam Shaw priv. col., see 1987 exh. cat., no. 11). Despite successful exhibitions at the Dowdeswell Gallery, London, the first of 39 cabinet pictures inspired by British poets (1899) and the second of 30 works inspired by the Book of Ecclesiastes (1902), and another at Leighton House, London (1902), the obscurity of many of his more elaborate allegorical pictures (e.g. Such is Life, exh. RA 1907; Leeds, C.A.G.) and his frequent shifts of style limited his admirers. He was obliged to turn to teaching, and in 1910, with Rex Vicat Cole (1870-1940), he opened the still-active Byam Shaw School of Art, London; this left him little time for his own work.

Part of the Shaw, Byam family

See the Abbreviations for further details.

The Concise Grove Dictionary of Art. Copyright © 2002 by Oxford University Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.