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Shirlaw, Walter
(b Paisley, Strathclyde, 6 Aug 1838; d Madrid, 26 Dec 1909). American painter, illustrator and teacher of Scottish birth. He moved to America with his parents in 1841. At the age of 14 he was apprenticed to a banknote engraving firm in New York. He exhibited his first painting at the National Academy of Design, New York, in 1861, although at this point he was largely self-taught. In Chicago (1865–70) he again worked as an engraver and was active in founding the Chicago Academy of Design. In 1870 Shirlaw went abroad. Unable to study painting in Paris because of the Franco-Prussian War, he went, instead, to Munich, where in 1871 he enrolled at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste. During the next six years he studied with several important Munich teachers and mastered the dark, painterly realism adopted also by Frank Duveneck and William Merritt Chase, compatriots Shirlaw became associated with as leaders of the Munich school. Toning the Bell (1874; Chicago, IL, A. Inst.) is representative of the Munich style he helped to introduce in America. Returning to New York in 1877, he was a founder-member and first president of the Society of American Artists, as well as an influential teacher at the Art Students League. Elected to the National Academy in 1888, Shirlaw was also an early popularizer of mural painting in late 19th-century America, contributing decorations to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and the allegorical Sciences (1895; in situ) for the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. His last years were devoted primarily to travel in Europe and to private teaching.
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