This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Martha
Walter was a well-known Philadelphia-born
Impressionist who specialized in light hearted, colorful beach scenes
especially of Gloucester, Coney Island, Atlantic City and the
French Coast. She went to Girls High School,
and from 1895 to 1898, studied at the Pennsylvania Museum & School of Industrial Art, now The University of the Arts College of Art and Design. Her recognitions at the school included the following:
1895/96: Received Certificate A in Industrial Drawing. Received honorable mention for the Henry Perry Leland Prize given by Mrs. John Harrison for work in Pen and Ink; $20 second prize for best set of drawings in the Course of Industrial Drawing.
1896/97: Received John T. Morris Prize of $10.00 for drawing of Details of the Human Figure; Jacob H. Weil Prize of an outfit of Oleo Water-Colors for best sketch in water-colors from Life.
1897/98: Honorable mention for the Mrs. George K. Crozer Prize offered for the best work in drawing; Caroline Axford Magee Prize of $20.00 for group of designs introducing decorative use of the human figure.
At the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, she
studied with William Merritt Chase, and at his insistence, she entered competitions for various student awards. She won the Tappan prize in
1902, and was one of four artists to win the first two-year Cresson
traveling scholarship in 1908, which afforded her the opportunity to go
to France, Holland, Italy and Spain.
She attended the Grande
Chaumiere in Paris where she had the advantage of the critical counsel
of both Rene Menard and Lucien Simon, but eventually she felt their
strictly classical approach too restrictive to her progress, so she
enrolled in the Academie Julian. Once again she grew weary of the
boundaries of tradition and so established her own studio in the Rue de
Bagneaux with several other young American women artists. It was at
this point that she developed her infatuation and skill for plain-air
subjects.
Walter's early work, 1900-1908, shows the very
strong influence of William Merritt Chase. Her use of rich saturated
colors, combined with her adept application of black paint was very
successful. Black was a pigment extraordinarily difficult to master,
and often omitted in the general course of American Impressionism.
The
quietude of Martha Walter's Paris period lasted until about 1912 when
she began to vivify her palette and concentrate on light and shadow.
Upon her return to America, around the beginning of World War I, she
favored the use of bright and intense colors as highlights in her beach
scenes of Bass Rock, Gloucester and Atlantic City. Her works had more
spontaneity, as she concentrated on hues rather than subjects. In this
sense she was once again in league with the French Impressionists who
were frequently more concerned with the color recorded than with the
form drawn. The subtle dissolution of forms tended to accentuate the
predominant central theme in her works. Her figures did not suffer;
they merely became more elusive.
Walter's influence throughout her career was
chiefly derived from the work and teachings of William Merritt Chase.
She journeyed to the very places where Chase had painted - Shinnecock,
Carmel, Paris, Holland, etc. Martha Walter had a studio in New York,
taught at Chase's New York School of Art and had a studio in Gloucester, and
even taught in Brittany. She was continually traveling back and forth
to Paris.
While she was in France, Eugene Boudin proved to be another
strong source of inspiration for her. Many of Walter's beach scenes
exhibit varying tones of gray, which are reminiscent of the atmospheric
quality achieved in Boudin's work. Many of Walter's canvases are
obviously distinct reflections of French Impressionism. Through it all
though, she developed a style of painting, which was a uniquely Martha
Walter, with bold dashing brush strokes in conjunction with total color
control, and well organized composition. Her style reflected the
sensitivity of her European predecessors, but maintained a vigor, which
was definitely American. Cecelia Beaux offered favorable criticism of
Walter's work by saying that the beach scenes seemed as if they were
blown onto the canvas.
Walter visited Chattanooga, Tennessee,
many times from 1903 to 1910, where she painted commissioned portraits
and landscapes during the summer. Her ability to contrast her light and
vibrant palette to the harsh reality of life in the mountains of
Tennessee as expressed by the children that she saw and portrayed make
the poignancy of the moment even more heart wrenching. Some of the
children that she portrayed were so under-privileged that they didn't
even know the meaning of the word mountain.
In 1922, Martha
Walter was given an exhibition of her paintings at the Galleries George
Petit in Paris. The French government purchased a painting entitled The
Checquered Cape from this exhibition, for the Musee de Luxembourg. This
picture was a study for a larger painting of the same name.
In
the 1930s, Martha Walter was represented by Milch Galleries in New York,
and it was then that she began to travel to North Africa to paint her
chromatic impressions of Tunis, Tripoli and Algiers. The harsh African
sun lent the cafe scenes, camel markets, and souk transactions an
intense but different color sense than her American and French
subjects. The broad flat planes of the local architecture, combined
with the flowing Arabian robes worn by the inhabitants, gave her
renderings of sharply defined areas of color a new dynamic quality.
From Africa, Walter traveled to the Dalmatian coast where she settled
for a long enough time to paint dozens of bustling market scenes.
Although
well advanced in years, Martha Walter continued to paint until a few
years before her death in 1976.
She has been represented in the Museum
collections of Musee de Luxembourg, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine
Arts, Art Institute of Chicago, Detroit Institute of Arts, Milwaukee
Art Center, Toledo Museum and the Woodmere Art Center, Philadelphia.
Sources:
Paul Sternberg, Art by American Women
Additional information supplied by Sara J. MacDonald, Public Services Librarian
The University of the Arts, whose source are the PMSIA commencement programs and annual reports.
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Biography from Hammer Galleries:
|  Martha Walter was best known as a painter of colorful beach scenes and landscapes. Influenced by the French impressionists during her travels abroad, these canvases were spontaneously executed with a palette of vivid colors.
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.
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Biography from Abby M. Taylor, Fine Art:
| It was in France, where Martha Walter established herself as a
plein-air Impressionist. For Martha Walter, like many young artists at
the turn of the century, an opportunity to study abroad was the next
and most vital step in an artistic career. At the insistence of
her teacher William Merritt Chase, Walter entered and won the Cresson
traveling scholarship. In 1903, courtesy of the Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts, she traveled to Paris to begin classes at the
Academie Grande Chaumiere and the Academie Julian. Walter soon
found the rigid academic institutions rather stifling to her natural
talents. Her French teachers saw in her, as did Chase, an innate
ability and naturalness that would only be inhibited by academic reins.
With her teachers’ blessing she was granted a special dispensation and
allowed to pursue her studies out of doors in the French
countryside. Walters was soon sharing a studio with several other
young American women and would remain in France until the outbreak of
World War I, producing many of her most important works in her very
independent and unique Impressionist style.
Martha Walters
returned to the United States at the outset of World War I and
gravitated to the artist colony of Gloucester, Massachusetts, a New
England fishing village. She would return there frequently for the rest
of her life.
Exhibitions:
Gallery Georges Petit, Paris
La Salon d’Automne
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
National Association of Women Artists
Toledo Museum of Art
Milwaukee Art Institute
Collections:
The Louvre
Musee du Luxembourg
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Art Institute of Chicago
Detroit Institute of the Arts
Toledo Museum of Art
Woodmere Art Gallery
Terra Museum of Art
Milwaukee Art Center |
Biography from Kingston Bay Gallery:
| Born in Philadelphia, Martha Walter was a well-known Philadelphia Impressionist who specialized in light hearted, colorful beach scenes, especially of Gloucester, Coney Island, Atlantic City and from along the French Coast.
She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy with William Merritt Chase. On a two-year traveling Cresson Scholarship, she visited France, Spain, Italy and Holland and attended the Academie Grande Chaumiere and the Academie Julian in Paris. Finding the academy structure too confining, she established a studio in the Rue De Bagneaus.
Her painting captured the animation of the city and the light and color of seashore scenes.
With World War I, she returned to the United States and set up a studio in Gloucester, Massachusetts, painting beach scenes. She also became intrigued with Ellis Island and painted people as they arrived in ethnic costume from other
countries. |
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Martha Walter is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Women Artists
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