*This painting is sold but the artist is regularly available in our inventory
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Martha Walter*
1875 – Philadelphia - 1976
Conversations by Pillars
Oil on canvas
8 x 10 1/4 inches
Literature: The Paintings of Martha Walter, Impressionist Jewels, A Retrospective, Woodmere Art Museum, 2002.
Martha Walter was born in Philadelphia in 1875. She attended Girls High School in Philadelphia and then began her artistic studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1894. At the academy she studied with William Merritt Chase, one of the most important American artists and the most celebrated art teacher of the time. Their student-teacher relationship continued, as Walter joined Chase at the Shinnecock School of Art, which he maintained at Southampton on Long Island from 1891 to 1902.
In 1902 Walter won the Toppan Prize for her work at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. The following year she went abroad on a Cresson Traveling Scholarship awarded by the Academy. Once in Paris, she enrolled at the prestigious Académie Julian, where she was the only American in a class of fifty women. She also joined a class at the Académie de la Grand Chaumière. She began to paint outdoor scenes, recording Parisian public life. This undertaking coincided with Walter’s first encounter with the American painter Alfred Maurer, whose work she much admired and whose paintings of the period may have provided inspiration for Walter’s early work. In 1904 Walter exhibited two works at the Paris Salon. Walter frequently traveled, especially to North Africa and Europe. Together with her friend, the artist Alice Schille, she spent many summers abroad, while living the rest of the year painting in Philadelphia.
Martha Walter’s paintings were critically well received from the outset of her career. She was first included in the biennial exhibition of contemporary American paintings at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1907, and she continued to show in this venue through 1926. In 1909 Walter received another award from the Pennsylvania Academy, the Mary Smith Prize for the best work by a woman resident of Philadelphia.
In 1910 Walter moved to New York City, eventually settling into the Chelsea Hotel on West Twenty-Third Street by 1914. She began exhibiting her paintings at the National Academy of Design. During these years she painted many portraits of children, most often in an outdoor setting. The advent of World War I, however, prevented Walter from enjoying her usual travels abroad. She began to spend her summers at the popular artists’ colony in Gloucester, Massachusetts. It was here that her work began to embody the full qualities of Impressionism, though her use of vivid colors and use of space showed a relationship to Post-Impressionism as well. Through the second half of the decade, Walter was a consistent exhibitor at the annual exhibitions of the Gallery on the Moors in Gloucester, often alongside fellow art colonists Cecilia Beaux, Jane Peterson, and travel companion Alice Schille. It was at her Gloucester studio where she first began to teach, subsequently offering classes while in residence in Chicago and New York.
In 1922 Walter painted what became her most celebrated images, a series of works depicting the immigrants on Ellis Island, awaiting entry into the United States. In contrast to her happy beach scenes, the Ellis Island series portrays the harsh realities of immigrant family life. Twenty-two of her Ellis Island paintings were included in a large one-artist exhibition at the prestigious Galleries Georges Petit in Paris in July 1922. The series subsequently appeared in 1923 at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Arlington Galleries in New York. In that same year Walter resumed her travels overseas, first North Africa, then northern Italy, and finally Spain. She returned to Philadelphia in 1928, and the paintings that grew out her travels found enthusiastic critical reception at home.
Around 1940, Walter appears to have ceased her extensive travels. She spent the rest of her years in the Philadelphia suburbs, living with her sisters. The George Hunter Museum of Art in Chattanooga, Tennessee, held a one-artist show of her work in 1953, and two years later the Woodmere Art Gallery held a major Martha Walter exhibition. In the late 1960s, the David David Gallery in Philadelphia began to represent her and shared her paintings with the Hammer Galleries in New York. Shortly before her centenary the Hammer Galleries featured a solo exhibition that emphasized the joyous aspects of her outdoor work as well as a turn to still lifes, some painted en plein air.
Martha Walter died in 1976. She was one hundred years old. Today, the works of Pennsylvania impressionist painter Martha Walter are represented in the Louvre, The Musée du Luxembourg, The Musée d’Orsay, The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, The Art Institute of Chicago, Detroit Institute of Arts, Milwaukee Art Center, Toledo Museum of Art, Terra Museum of Art and The Woodmere Art Gallery.
In our piece Conversation by Pillars, Martha Walter has captured a lively scene outside what appears to be a mosque, recorded around 1924, during her stay in North Africa. Having traversed Europe, including the Adriatic Coast, before World War 1 and having witnessed the experiences of immigrants from all over the Continent, Central and Eastern Europe especially, at Ellis Island, she may have considered it a logical step to venture to North Africa in 1924, where she visited Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. A large group of men are sitting in the shade offered by the vaulted ceiling of the entrance to a mosque. Leaning against the large pillars, the men, dressed in flowing robes and turbans, are engaged in conversation with one another, creating the relaxed atmosphere that emerges from this piece. The pillars are held in a sparkling blue color that leaves the scenery with a lively feel. As the viewer’s eye moves towards the end of the row of pillars, the last vault creates a peephole to the outside world. Thus, we notice the steep hillside that rises with its densely packed houses held in a brilliant white color that creates a beautiful contrast to the blue sky. With this piece Martha Walter proves conclusively that she is as expert in the use of watercolor as she is in the more majestic medium of oil.
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