Painting of a Cotton Picker by William Aiken Walker

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Painting of a Cotton Picker by William Aiken Walker

About the Item

William Aiken Walker (American, b. c.1838-1921). Man in a cottonfield. Oil on board, signed lower left. Painting size: 8.25” x 4.25”. Frame size: 12.5” x 8.5”. A lifelong artist, Walker exhibited his first painting at the age of twelve and continued to paint until his death 71 years later. In the 1860s Walker traveled to Dusseldorf for artistic training and remained for several years. Returning to Charleston, he joined the Confederate Army and served as a cartographer. At the conclusion of the war, Walker moved to Baltimore where he had spent a portion of his childhood. Until 1876, Walker split his residence between Charleston and Baltimore. However, on a visit to New Orleans in that year, he fell in love with the city and spent the next 29 years, calling it home. Best known for his genre scenes of African Americans in the post Civil War South, Walker is listed in numerous references including Who Was Who in American Art by Falk and Art Across America by Gerdts. He has also been the subject of several monographs. William Aiken Walker was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on March 11, 1839. He had an artistic bent at a very early age; he exhibited his first oil painting at the South Carolina Institute in 1850 when he was 11 years old. The first known still life by Walker was produced in 1858. Animal and fish portraits followed, along with a few portraits and landscapes. During the Civil War, Walker served as a private in Charleston's Palmetto Regiment of the South Carolina Volunteers. He was given a medical discharge in August 1861. He continued to serve as a volunteer draftsman in the Confederate Engineers Corps. When Charleston was decimated in a great fire in 1861, Walker recorded the resultant ruins. In 1863 Charleston was shelled by Union troops; Walker recorded that event too. In 1864 Walker created perhaps the most collectible of all decks of American playing cards. Sixteen of the cards carried miniature paintings, ranging from the bombardment of Fort Sumter to portraits of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard, and Stonewall Jackson as kings. What Walker did between 1866 and 1868 remains a mystery, but by the latter year he had settled in Baltimore. He visited New York and Cuba but was back in Baltimore by 1871, when he began the series of paintings that would capture the attention of present-day collectors. Walker's Gathering Herbs, 1871, depicted an African-American woman at the herb garden, a basket in her arms, and another on her head. The depictions of what would be later known as "The Sunny South" had commenced. Although he painted scenes depicting Anglo-Saxon citizens and landscapes, it would be the African-American scenes that would come to be recognized as Walker's seminal body of work. He traveled extensively in the South, from South Carolina to the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, to Florida, to New Orleans, and wherever he traveled, he painted. The focus of his energy from the early 1880s to the mid-1890s was the cotton trade. Walker was fortunate in many ways, not the least of which is the fact that his paintings were collected and sold during his lifetime. Major paintings sold in the $70 to $100 range while he still was alive. By the time Walker had reached his sixties, he returned to landscapes and still life subjects, though his bread-and-butter work was still the genre scenes of the Old South. Walker died on January 3, 1921, just two months shy of his 82nd birthday. Second Bio: William Aiken Walker was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1839 to an Irish Protestant father and a mother of South Carolina background. Walker would grow up southerner through and through. He completed his first painting at age twelve and continued painting until his death in 1921 at age eighty-three. When his father died in 1842, Walker's mother took her family to Baltimore, where they remained until returning to Charleston in 1848. During this period, he began painting rural farm and plantation scenes of poor southern blacks and it was these works that he built his reputation. Something of a prodigy as an artist, Walker exhibited his first painting in 1850, and received his first one-man show at the South Carolina Institute Fair in 1850 and Courtenay’s Bookstore in Charleston. In 1861, Walker enlisted in the Confederate Army and served under General Wade Hampton's South Carolina brigade. In 1862 at the Battle of Seven Pines, he was wounded. On his recovery, he was transferred back to Charleston, where he was eventually placed on picket duty, which freed him to resume his painting. For the next two years his service to the Confederacy consisted mainly of drawing maps and sketches of Charleston's defenses, until he was mustered out at the end of 1864. After the Civil War, Walker first moved to Baltimore and would begin traveling to southern resort areas, where he painted postcard studies and small paintings, which he sold to tourists for between fifty cents and three dollars. Walker was perhaps the earliest artist in the South to make a living from the tourist trade. His paintings served much like postcards, mementoes (just the right size to be tucked in a suitcase) of the "Old South" in all its quaintness and beauty. For more than fifty years, Walker frequently visited New Orleans, Baltimore, Charleston, and several towns and cities in Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida. Maintaining ties with New Orleans, he exhibited frequently at the Southern Art Union and the Artists’ Association. No other Southern artist so prolifically portrayed his land during the post-Civil War Reconstruction and developing new South than William Aiken Walker. In the French Quarter he often sold his paintings on the corner of Royal and Dumaine Streets. The multitalented Walker sang, played the piano and violin, and wrote poetry in both French and English. An engaging conversationalist, he was a welcome houseguest on his many trips. Walker was something of an eccentric as well as debonair figure, who delighted in passing himself off as a professor when he was not playing the role of landless gentry. Welcomed as a house and hotel guest, he made regular stops annually at as many of the growing resorts of the South as he could manage in a season, working his way from New Orleans to the Blue Ridge mountains, down to Charleston, and along the coast southwards to Florida, at each stop placing some of his small-scale paintings of rural black cabins, sharecroppers working in the fields, or palmetto-lined beaches for sale to passing tourists. The dialect writing of George Washington Cable, Lafcadio Hearn, and even Mark Twain is echoed in Walker's images, which also parallel the kind of drama (or, more accurately, melodrama) being written about the South in the same period. Like the consumers of consciously "regional" literature, the consumers of Walker's paintings were not those who had passed their lives in the rural South, but rather were the Yankees and the urban businessman of the New South, admirers of a mythic, unhurried and untroubled Southland that existed mainly in their imaginations. Museums: Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville, FL. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA. Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA. Richmond Art Museum, Richmond, IN. Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. Greenville Museum of Art, Greenville, NC. The Newark Museum, Newark, NJ. The Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY. Springfield Museum, Springfield, MO. Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, NC. Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. San Antonio Museum, San Antonio, Texas. Maier Museum of Art, Lynchburg, VA. Third Bio: A genre painter, William Aiken Walker, is primarily known for his expressions of plantations, cotton fields, African Americans, and dock scenes. The son of a prominent cotton agent, he was a true Southerner, born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1838. Walker completed his first painting at twelve and painted until his death in 1921. Although he studied in Dusseldorf sometime during the 1860s, he was primarily self-taught. A social and friendly man, Walker often entertained friends with stories of his southern travels, which included Florida, Texas, and the Carolinas. It is thought that he was somewhat inspired by European artistic subjects and styles, and also made at least one trip to that continent. Currier and Ives published several of his color lithographs in 1884; most notably "Cotton Plantation on the Mississippi" and "The Levee, New Orleans," and his recognition soon grew. Throughout the Civil War, Walker remained in Charleston; becoming a member of the Confederate Engineer Corps, drafting sketches and preparing maps for the Confederacy. From 1876 to 1905 Walker regarded New Orleans as his home. There he became especially close to Everett B. D. Fabino Julio, with whom he tried to form an art league. Although their league did not succeed, the project led to what would later become the Southern Art Union, which was formed in 1880, the earliest such association in New Orleans. Walker's most productive period was during the early 1880s when he painted hundreds of pictures of poor rustic blacks. He enjoyed North Carolina, and spent many summers at Arden Park Lodge in the Asheville area, until it burned in 1919. The lodge was owned by Charles Beale of Arden, who became Walker's patron, enabling him to become a regular artist-in-residence and to sell his paintings, with scenes of blacks working on tobacco farms, at the lodge. His works are detailed due to some use of a camera, and sometimes lack emotional depth. The number of landscapes he painted increased after 1890. Walker had added talents, and was known to sing, play the violin and piano, and compose poetry in English and French. Walker exhibited at the Southern Art Union, 1880, Boston Arts Club, 1881, American Expo, 1885-86, Artist's Association of New Orleans, 1885-1905, and the Columbian Expo, Chicago, 1893. Public Collections that include his work are:Historic New Orleans Collection, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, High Museum of Art, Morris Museum of Art, Greenville County Museum of Art, Gibbes Museum of Art, Amon Carter Museum of Western Art. Memberships include: Wednesday Club, Baltimore, Artist's Association of New Orleans.

Creator:
William Aiken Walker (Artist)
Dimensions:
Height: 12.5 in (31.75 cm)Width: 8.5 in (21.59 cm)Depth: 1 in (2.54 cm)
Materials and Techniques:
Composition
Place of Origin:
United States
Period:
1870-1879
Date of Manufacture:
circa 1870
Condition:
Minor losses.
Seller Location:
Alexandria, VA
Reference Number:
Seller: 84661stDibs: LU155623166112