| Facts/Data
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Birth
1838 (Charleston, South Carolina)
Death
1921 (Charleston, South Carolina)
Lived/Active
South Carolina
Copyright by Owner
Often Known For
cotton kingdom genre, landscape
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  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, Galveston, 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.
Walkers 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 Walkers patron, enabling him to become a regular artist-in-residence and to sell his paintings at the lodge, with scenes of blacks working on tobacco farms.
His works are detailed due to some use of a camera, and sometimes lack of 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. One of his art students was Blanche Blanchard, who copied some of his work and painted in Walkers style.
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Biography from Charleston Renaissance Gallery:
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WILLIAM AIKEN WALKER (1839-1921)
The name of William Aiken Walker is practically synonymous with painting in the South at the end of the last century, so popular were his images of Negroes, their cabins and their way of life. Indeed, Walker used an assembly line method of a sort to turn out post card-size portraits which he sold to the Yankee tourist trade as souvenirs of the Old South. A lesser-known aspect of his career are his topographical drawings, which include a series of careful renderings of Florida's east coast from New Smyrna to the Keys. Also surprising to discover are Walker's masterful trompe l'oeil paintings of fish and game which he did a full twenty years before William Harnett and Alexander Pope.
Walker was a serious, accomplished studio artist who had taken himself abroad to study in Dusseldorf, and yet he wanted little more than to paint the common man and in doing produce pictures that the common man could afford. Walker once said: "I am like the machine: I paint and repaint these subjects so that many can share the feelings I have for this magnificent world of ours. Art is not only for the artist, it is for all and I shall do my best to see that all can afford it, to the extent that I shall paint and paint and paint until the brush runs dry."(1)
Walker was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and raised partly there and in Baltimore, Maryland. At the tender age of twelve he exhibited a painting at the South Carolina Institute Fair of 1850, no doubt his first public showing. In 1860 he went to Dusseldorf to study art.(2) By the time the War Between the States erupted, he was back home, and he enlisted. Injuries that he suffered at the Battle of Seven Pines took him out of action for awhile, but having recuperated, he returned to service as a cartographer.
Charleston at the end of the War was no place for an artist to earn a living, as we saw in the essay on J. Beaufain Irving; accordingly, Walker moved to Baltimore, a city with which he was already familiar. Walker did not forsake Charleston altogether; in fact, he usually visited his birthplace for one month every year, and the art stores there always had paintings of his for sale. He would go to visit friends on nearby plantations and make sketches of their magnificent homes and the Negro sharecroppers who worked for them.
Walker’s output was prodigious, as proven by his diary entries made on a visit to Cuba in 1869. Having arrived on December 14, he recorded on January 1, less than three weeks later, that he had already completed forty-seven pictures! He apparently wrote the truth when he began each day’s journal entry with words like, “worked hard all day.”(3)
Walker's normal operating procedure in the seventies was to spend the summer in Baltimore, a bit of the fall in Charleston and then to head further south for the winter months, either to New Orleans, which he first visited in 1876, or to St. Augustine or Ponce Park, Florida. He immediately "fell in love with" New Orleans, which he visited again and again over a thirty-year period.(4) He would often set up his easel at the corner of Royal and Dumaine Streets and sell freshly painted boards to the passing tourists. In this instance, Walker would take a large piece of academy board, mark it off into sections, each measuring eight by four inches, and then go over the whole with his ground color, usually sienna; next he would paint in the sky, the landscape, and finally place a figure in each rectangular space. He would then divide the board along the lines previously drawn into nearly pocket-size compositions.
What he did not sell to passers-by he would consign to local galleries, photography studios and gift shops, "all of which had a steady stream of prospective purchasers."5 Walker painted at least two major compositions over his years in New Orleans, both of which were lithographed by Currier and Ives. "The Levee at New Orleans" dates to 1883 and "Southern Cotton Plantation" was completed the following year.
Though these larger compositions may have been commissioned by wealthy patrons, Walker was able to stick to his goal of providing art for the common man, since Currier and Ives sold the prints for three dollars apiece. Wherever Walker went, he made it a point to treat himself well. He was something of a gastronome, having made a note in the diary of his Cuban trip of the many fine pastry shops to be found in Havana. When he had the option on traveling by steamboat or railroad he more often chose the former, because not only could he sketch the passing scene while under way, but also the steamboats were famous for their "plentiful cuisine."(6)
Beginning in 1884 Walker modified his itinerary somewhat by spending part of each summer in the Smoky Mountains. He would ensconce himself at the Arden Park Lodge, twenty miles from Asheville, to serve the steadily rising number of tourists to the area. (See essay on E. T. H. Foster.) He would paint his Negro sharecroppers from photographs and he also took to painting the local mountain folk.(7)
Walker must have been a welcome guest wherever he went. His biographers tell that he could sing, play the piano and violin and recite poetry admirably, and that he was often called upon to entertain. We can enjoy his generous spirit today in his legacy, a body of work which records faithfully and kindly the life of the Negroes, the landscape and the industry from Maryland to Florida and west to the Mississippi throughout the difficult years of Reconstruction.
(1) August P. Trovaioli and Roulhac B. Toledano. "William Aiken Walker, Southern Genre Painter". Baton Rouge: Louisiana.
(2) Theodore Stebbins. "American Master Drawings and Watercolors, A History of Works on Paper from Colonial Times to the Present". New York: Harper and Row in association with the Drawing Society, Inc., 1876.
(3) Trovaioli and Toledano, p. 30.
(4) John Fowler. "William Aiken Walker, Some New Orleans Notes". 15th Annual New Orleans Antiques Show and Sale, p. 10.
(5) Ibid, p. 11.
(6) Trovaioli and Toledano, p. 30.
(7) Margi Conrads. "Art and Art Life: Knoxville, Tennessee and the Greater Smoky Mountain Region: 1830-1930", unpublished manuscript. Copyright by Margi Conrads, 1985, p. 21. |
Biography from Carolina Galleries - Southern Art:
|  William Aiken Walker
1838-1921
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:
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:
Wednesday Club
Baltimore, Artist’s Association of New Orleans
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Biography from Fred R. Kline Gallery, Inc.:
|  WILLIAM AIKEN WALKER’S EARLY TEXAS PERIOD, 1874-1876:
A FREQUENT BIOGRAPHICAL OMISSION
Submitted by Fred R. Kline, Kline Art Research Associates, Santa Fe, NM
William Aiken Walker, while in his mid-30s, lived and painted in Texas for several years during the 1870s. He arrived in Galveston in 1874 and spent most of his time there. In 1876, he traveled to San Antonio and lived there for perhaps six months before leaving Texas altogether. From Walker’s two year period in Texas, less than ten paintings have been located and less than five have been published, the most notable being View of Galveston Harbor (Rosenberg Library, Galveston), San Jose Mission, San Antonio (Witte Museum-San Antonio Museum Foundation), and San Antonio Flower Girl (Private Collection, Santa Fe).
The San Antonio genre and architectural paintings of Theodore Gentilz (1819-1906), pioneer San Antonio artist and art teacher who was active and well known in the city from 1844 to 1894, very likely influenced Walker and it is plausible, based on Gentilz’s style and primary subject matter and the close affinities found in Walker’s San Antonio and later paintings, that Gentilz may also have given instruction to Walker. William Aiken Walker’s early Texas paintings, a small but significant body of work, offer rare and historically important examples of the 19th century period in Texas Art History, a period represented by relatively few published works.
Important Note: After his Texas-period, Walker became widely known in the Deep South for his genre paintings of African-American cotton field workers, a body of many hundreds of standardized works that has stimulated scores of fakes, questionable 20th c. works “in the manner of Walker” (see Maine Antique Digest, July 2000: “How Bogus Paintings Plagued the Art Market for Over a Decade: The William Aiken Walker Affair” by David Hewett). Numerous clever forgeries of the cotton field genre still range across the art markets and have often been mistakenly “authenticated” by Walker specialists. No Texas paintings by Walker have been found to be forgeries.
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