"Walter Bayes, R.W.S., the painter and writer on artistic subjects, who was a founder member of the Camden Town group, died on January 21, 1956 at his home at Hampstead.  He was 88.

 

It might be an overstatement to say that Bayes was too intellectual for a painter, but it is certainly true to say that he excelled in what has been called the science of picture making, including perspective and the proportioning and balancing of colour. He was an academic artist in the sense in which the French rather than the English would understand the description, and his artistic ancestor was Poussin. This character, while it left Bayes's own work rather cold and dry in feeling, made him an admirable teacher and critic of art. His influence, in matters of construction rather than of execution, can be traced in the work of several contemporary artists who were trained under him at the Westminster School of Art; and his writings in the old Athenaeum, of which he was art critic from 1906 to 1916, afterwards holding the same position on the Saturday  Review,  were among the most fundamental of his time.

Bayes was a son of A. W. Bayes, painter and etcher, and brother of Gilbert Bayes, the sculptor, and Jessie Bayes, the illuminator and decorative designer.  Educated at University College School, he studied art at evening classes only, except for three months at the Westminster School of Art.  In one book of reference Bayes was described as "painter and decorator of buildings and theatrical scenery," and the description covers his more characteristic activities.  Interesting examples of his decorative work are to be found in the Regent Cinema Theatre, Brighton, where, about 1919, he collaborated with the architect.  His "The Underworld," a large  painting  of  East Londoners, sheltering from an air-raid in a Tube station, exhibited in the Academy of 1918, was bought for the Imperial War Museum, where he is also represented by a design for tapestry of "Survivors from a Torpedoed Ship." His work is also represented in the Tate Gallery and in public galleries at Liverpool, Manchester, Dublin, and Johannesburg. 

He was a fairly regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy of both figure subjects and landscapes, mostly painted in the South of France.  Among the more important were "The Ford," 1917, purchased out of the Chantrey Bequest Fund for the Tate Gallery; "Pulvis et Umbra," 1919; "Oratio Obliqua," 1920; "Les Jeux sont faits,"  1925;  "Evening with Canaletto," the central group of a large composition executed for the Oxford Cinema, 1936; and "Martigues," 1938. The title of "Lilac and Gold," exhibited in 1940, gives a hint of Bayes's taste in colour, the general tonality of his pictures recalling Poussin, whom he resembled in other respects.  His figure subjects often had a characteristically sardonic flavour.

Slightly grim and cynical at first acquaintance, Bayes quickly became friendly and communicative to anybody he found to be seriously interested in art.  It pleased him to pose as a disappointed man, and in the preface to the catalogue of an exhibition of his works at the Leger Galleries in 1934 he described himself as an "amateur" - which was true only in so far as easel pictures might be regarded as leisure products of one of the most professional of artists in his own field of mural decoration.  He had highly developed ideas about the relationship between painting and architecture, and for a time he taught mural decoration at the school of the Architectural Association.  He also lectured on perspective for a period of years at the Royal Academy of Arts and the Slade School.  His period as head of the Westminster Art School was from 1918 to 1934; and later, from 1944 to 1949, he was director of the painting school of the Lancaster School of Arts and Crafts. He was also for some years principal examiner in drawing and painting to the Board of Education.

As a writer on art Bayes was both sound and witty. Besides his contributions to periodicals, including  the  Architectural  Review,  he published at least three books: The Art of Decorative Painting, in 1927; A Painter's Baggage, illustrated with brilliant pen drawings, in 1932; and Turner, a Speculative Portrait, in 1931.  The last, which is preoccupied with Turner's love affairs, real or supposed, and periodical disappearances from respectable society, is thoroughly characteristic of Bayes's ironical attitude to life.
 

He married in 1904, Miss Katherine Telfer, and had two sons."

January 23, 1956

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