Walter Frederick Roofe Tyndale was born to English parents at Château Schapsdael, near Bruges, Belgium, on 10 August 1855 and trained at the academies of Bruges and Antwerp and in Paris. His family immigrated to Bath, England in 1871, following the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. He worked first as a portrait painter and later as a widely travelled watercolourist and illustrator, exhibiting at the Royal Academy and as a member of the Royal Instiute of Painters in Water Colours. Walter Tyndale died in Kensington, London, England, on 16 December 1943.
Watercolourist, illustrator and travel writer, Walter Frederick Roofe Tyndale was born on 10 August 1855 at Château Schapsdael, near Bruges, Belgium, to English parents, John Nash Tyndale, a barrister of the Middle Temple in London, and Charlotte Flora Hulme. He spent his first 16 years in Bruges, where he attended drawing classes at the city's academy. Following the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, the family immigrated to England and in 1871 settled in Bath, Somerset. Three years later, Tyndale returned to Belgium to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, where he won a silver medal for drawing from the antique. He then moved to Paris, where he studied under Léon Bonnat and worked in the studio of the Belgian painter Jan Van Beers. In the late 1870s, he returned to England to earn his living as a professional artist. In 1883, he married Evelyn Barnard in Bath, a daughter of the Reverend Thomas M. Barnard; the couple had three sons.
Tyndale's early work consisted of portraits and genre subjects in oils. His first exhibit at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1880 was a portrait of renowned actress, Sarah Bernhardt, and his genre painting, The Sermon was shown in 1888. Many of his portrait commissions were worked up from photographs of deceased sitters, a practice he called a 'funereal form of art' (Holland, 1906, p. 290). Around 1890, after settling in Haslemere, Surrey, where he taught painting, he turned exclusively to watercolour. He was encouraged by the landscape painter Claude Hayes and by Helen Allingham, whose delicate execution informed his own English cottage and garden subjects. His mature work consists of topographical views of villages, streets and markets, painted largely out of doors and enlivened by carefully observed figures, with close attention to architectural detail and strong effects of sunlight. Contemporary critics found him more at ease with the light of southern Europe and North Africa than with the English atmosphere (Ibid., p. 294). Born and brought up outside England, he continued to find his principal subjects abroad, while basing himself there. His preference for architecture was attributed to his Belgian childhood, and he described the Bavarian town of Rothenburg as 'a little paradise for sketchers' (Ibid., p. 295).
In 1894, Tyndale sat on the committee for the first exhibition of local artists in Haslemere, which led to the founding of the Haslemere Society of Artists. He was its last President and, in 1931, a founding member of the Haslemere Art Society, which succeded it. His work came to the attention of the dealers Dowdeswell and Dowdeswell, who sent him to paint in the Middle East (Ibid., p. 293). His solo exhibitions at the Dowdeswell Galleries, London, included Cairo, The Lebanon and Damascus (1898), Cairo, Jerusalem and Sicily (1899), Italy (1901), Rothenburg (1902) and Fruit and Flower Stalls (1904). In 1900, he commissioned W. F. Unsworth and Inigo Triggs to design Broad Dene, his Arts and Crafts house in Haslemere.
In 1904, A & C Black, pioneers of three-colour printing, commissioned him to illustrate a volume on Thomas Hardy's Wessex. The resulting watercolours were shown at the prestigious Leicester Galleries, London, in 1905. Tyndale illustrated numerous books, including The New Forest and Horatio F. Brown's Dalmatia (1925), and he also wrote and illustrated his own travel books, such as Japan & the Japanese (1910), An Artist in Egypt (1912) and An Artist in Italy (1913). The Leicester Galleries showed his watercolours for An Artist in Egypt in 1912. He held solo exhibitions at the Fine Art Society, London, in 1914, 1920 and 1924, and exhibited at the Royal Academy on 21 occasions between 1880 and 1934. He was elected a member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours in 1911, an associate of the Royal British Colonial Society of Artists in 1918 and a full member in 1926.
During the First World War, aged almost 60, Tyndale accepted a commission as a censor with the British Expeditionary Force. He served at Le Havre from 1915 and later as Head Censor at Boulogne, with the rank of Captain. He spent much of his later life in Venice while keeping a home in London, and his final exhibition, of watercolours of Tunisia and Egypt, was held in London in June 1943. Walter Tyndale died in Kensington, London, on 16 December 1943. His obituary in The Times noted that his picturesque manner had fallen out of fashion, while acknowledging the skill of his execution and the liveliness of his figures (The Times, 11 January 1944, p. 6). His works are held in UK public collections including the V&A and the Royal Collection Trust.I n 1984, the Mathaf Gallery, London, devoted an exhibition and catalogue to his Eastern Travels.
Michal Mel
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Walter Tyndale ]
Publications related to [Walter Tyndale ] in the Ben Uri Library