Martha Walter
1875 - 1976
Birth-PlacePhiladelphia, PA
BiographyMartha Walter, born and raised in Philadelphia, attended her first art classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts after graduating from high school. In 1896 the American Impressionist and "plein-air" advocate William Merritt Chase took a position at the Academy and Walter became one of his disciples, spending the summers of 1899 and 1900 painting outdoors at Chase's Shinnecock Art School on Long Island.(1) Walter eventually chafed at the relatively conservative training she was receiving at the Academy and Chase encouraged her to broaden her experience in Europe. In 1903 she won a two-year Cresson Travel Fellowship and arrived in Paris late that year. She studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the Académie Julian and extended her education with travel to the Netherlands, Spain, and Italy. Walter stayed in Europe for more than ten years, returning with the outbreak of World War I. During her time in Europe, she and several other young American women artists formed a studio in Paris; for Walter, the informal association became a vital source of constructive criticism, collegiality, and friendship.(2) It was the first of several supportive female networks that proved integral to her artistic development during her career.In both France and the United States, Walter became known for plein-air beach scenes. Her subjects ranged from leisure pastimes of the wealthy in French resort villages, to populist entertainments for the working classes in Atlantic City, to fishermen working the docks on the New England coast. Walter continued to travel well after her student days, notably to North Africa and Eastern Europe in the 1930s; she taught in both New York and Brittany. She exhibited frequently, with solo shows in Paris (1922) as well as Cincinnati (1914), New York (1931, 1969), Chicago (1941), and Philadelphia (1955, 1977, 1978), and in group shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, National Academy of Design, Art Institute of Chicago, and other venues, winning consistent praise for her Impressionist palette and spontaneous brushwork. She showed work at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts annual exhibitions for more than fifty years.(3) Walter painted almost until her death at age one hundred.
N.N
NOTES:
1. Nancy Stula, "American Artists Abroad and Their Inspiration: Selections from the Lyman Allyn Art Museum" (New London, Conn.: Lyman Allyn Art Museum, 2004), p. 59.
2. Eleanor Tufts, "American Women Artists, 1830-1930" (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1987), cat. no. 58. A member of Walter's American network of women artists was Jane Peterson, whose "Fifth Avenue and Washington Square" is included in the exhibition.
3. Anne W. Scholl, "Martha Walter (1875-1976)" (Boston: Vose Galleries, 1992), n.p.
EXTENDED BIO
Martha Walter (March 19, 1875 – January 1976) was an American impressionist painter.
Walter was a Philadelphia native. She studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, where she was taught by William Merritt Chase. She won the school's Toppan Prize and Cresson Traveling Scholarship. In 1909 also she won the school's Mary Smith Prize for the best painting by a resident female artist. On her scholarship she traveled to Spain Italy, the Netherlands and France. In France she received tuition from Rene Menard and Lucien Simon at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.
She went on to teach art at Chase's New York School of Art.
REFERENCES
W Douglass Paschall. 2002. Impressionist Jewels: The Paintings of Martha Walter. Woodmere Art Museum.
Person Type(not assigned)
Terms
