A proponent of the Arts and Crafts Movement, Pickford Waller was both a significant collector and an artist and designer in his own right.
Pickford Waller was born at 26 Grosvenor Street West, Pimlico, London, on 29 October 1849, the son of the builder, Robert John Waller. The Waller family had built part of Belgravia and Pimlico for Thomas Cubitt, and remained active as builders, interior decorators and estate agents. Waller appears to have entered this firm on leaving St Nicholas College, Lancing, in 1867, but took little interest in it.
Introduced to James McNeill Whistler by their mutual artist friend, Matthew White Ridley, Waller soon became a collector of his work and of others – first that of J W North and G J Pinwell and then, most significantly, Aubrey Beardsley. Later, he would become the most important patron of Charles Conder and Austin Osman Spare. As a result of his interest in such artists, he began to produce artistic work of his own.
By 1896, Waller was living at 27 St George’s Road, at the southern corner of Eccleston Square, Pimlico (now St George’s Drive).
From that year, he entered design competitions that were held by The Studio, the leading magazine of fine and applied art at the turn of the century. (The present drawings are from sketchbooks from this period.) Developing as an illustrator and bookplate artist, he worked with his artist friend, James Guthrie, whose Pear Tree Press published Songs and Verses selected from the works of Edmund Waller (illustrated by Pickford Waller, 1902) and Book-plates by Pickford Waller (1916). Further volumes, particularly of bookplates, appeared with other publishers in subsequent years. Waller became a member of the American Bookplate Society in 1917.
Waller lived latterly at Oriel Lodge, 4 Wollstonecraft Road, Boscombe, Bournemouth, and died there on 26 March 1930. In the following year, Frank Hollings published The choice & remarkably extensive Aubrey Beardsley collection: assembled by the late Pickford Waller, together with first editions & finely illustrated books.
Waller’s only child, Sybil, lived on in the house. As a young woman, she had often sat for commissions from artists, including Maurice Grieffenhagen, George Lambert and Charles Shannon; while, in 1910, William Nicholson painted them together in the Conder Room at their home in St George’s Road. Much later, she wrote A Song of Thanksgiving and other verses (privately printed, 1950) and The Kingdom of Pan (a poem and five short essays, privately published by the Carvel Press, 1952). Following her death in February 1973, The Pickford Waller Collection was sold at Christie’s.
Further reading: John Lumley, ‘The Pickford Wallers’, in John Herbert (ed), Christie’s Review of the Season 1974, London: Hutchinson, 1974
