Martha Walter
At the Circus
c. 1920

Name: At the Circus
Brand: Martha Walter
Price: 6800 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Martha Walter was a second generation American Impressionist painter. She devoted her long and successful career to painting life as she saw it with overtones of Impressionism and Modernism. Her favored subjects were women and children, and she preferred above all else to paint right in front of her subjects rather than to work from sketches or photographs. In this way, she painted at the shore, in the teeming markets of North Africa, and – in a unique series of paintings known as her Ellis Island group – inside the crowded immigration facilities on New York’s Ellis Island. A native of Philadelphia, Walter attended Girls High School. While still in school, she was admitted to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where she studied with William Merritt Chase. With Chase she began to paint with rich, saturated color and to successfully use black, which for the most part was avoided by the Impressionists. In 1908, Walter was the recipient of the academy’s Cresson Traveling Scholarship, which paid for two years of study and travel abroad. She went to Paris and enrolled, successively in the Academie Grande Chaumiere and the Academie Julian, but finding Parisian academy instruction far too conservative, she left to paint Parisian cafes and park scenes en plein air. She rented a studio with other young women from the United States who shared her views. Walter first attracted renown for her beach scenes, a theme that had its genesis while she was in France, on the beaches of St. Malo, Deauville, Trouville, and Biarritz. The onset of World War I brought her back to the United States. She took a studio in New York City and continued to paint colorful figures at the beach by visiting Coney Island, Atlantic City and Gloucester, Massachusetts, where she summered and opened an art school. Walter participated in the annual exhibitions of the Pennsylvania Academy over a fifty-year period and received the academy’s gold medal in 1923. She also exhibited for thirty-two years in the annuals of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work was the subject of one-woman exhibitions at the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1914, the Galerie Georges Petit, Paris in 1922 and the Art Club of Chicago in 1941.

Creator:

Martha Walter (1875-1976, American)

Creation Year:

c. 1920

Dimensions:

Height: 10.5 in (26.67 cm)Width: 13.25 in (33.66 cm)

Medium:

Watercolor

Movement & Style:

American Impressionist

Period:

1920-1929

Condition:

Beautifully framed in a Motyka frame.

Gallery Location:

Lawrence, NY

Reference Number:

1stDibs: LU149728819462

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Martha Walter

Walter was born in Philadelphia in 1875. She enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she studied under William Merritt Chase, who became her primary mentor. At his insistence, she entered a number of Academy student competitions and eventually won a prestigious Cresson Traveling Scholarship in 1908. This award enabled her to travel throughout Europe, where she continued her art education at the Grande Julien in Paris. Soon disenchanted with the academicism of the Parisian schools, Walter set out on her own and began producing plein-air paintings in the manner of the French Impressionists. At the outbreak of World War I, she returned to the United States and took up painting at various East coast beach resorts such as Coney Island and Gloucester. In her beach scenes of this period, colorful bathing suits, gowns and umbrellas punctuate a tranquil, pastel surface. Her expertise in the treatment of light and shadow is evident in her depictions of these settings at various times of day. In 1922, she spent some months painting the thousands of immigrants kept in the detention hall at Ellis Island. The dreadful, crowded conditions inspired a group of paintings that were exhibited that year in the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris. One was selected for the permanent collection of the Musée de Luxembourg. An exhibition at the Art Club of Chicago in 1941 featured a group of watercolor paintings inspired by the artist's travels through Spain and North Africa. These works were intensely colored visions of such subjects as Algerian street scenes, mosques and Spanish fishermen. Walter worked well into her nineties, continuing to paint portraits of women and children, beach scenes, gardens and marketplaces. Before her death in 1976, she had exhibited widely, and her works are included in major national and international private and public collections. Hammer Galleries had several exhibitions of her work during her lifetime, the last taking place in 1975 when the artist was one hundred years old.