Martha Walter

Martha Walter (1876 - 1976) was an American painter widely acclaimed for her impressionistic depictions of portraits, beach scenes, and landscapes with an overtone of modernism. Known for her bold and colorful style of paintings, Walter produced impressionistic paintings executed en Plein air, of life as she saw it, a specialization that would remain throughout her long and successful career. Find an impressive collection of Martha Walter paintings for sale covering all phases of the painter’s career on Bidsquare online auction.

Born in Philadelphia, PA, Walter studied at the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under the influential painter William Merritt Chase. She won the Cresson traveling scholarship that allowed her the opportunity to travel and study in Europe. She attended classes at the Académie Chaumiere and later the Académie Julian, but she felt the Parisian academy instruction was far too restrictive and grew weary of the boundaries of tradition, and therefore set up her own studio in the Rue de Bagneaux along with several other young American women artists. Soon Walter developed her passion and skill for plain-air subjects as she preferred to work out-of-doors in sun-drenched surroundings on scenes from everyday life, her paintings vivified with a bold palette of saturated colors combined with her skillful application of black paint, a color that was difficult to master, and mostly excluded by other Impressionists.

Her favored subjects were women and children, as she preferred to paint right in front of her subjects that eventually brought her to the shores of Biarritz, St. Malo, and Trouville, which resulted in colorful impressionistic scenes of beeches that became a hallmark of her career. She painted at the teeming markets of North Africa before moving to the Dalmatian coast to paint the bustling market scenes, and - in a series of paintings based on the women and children she saw inside the crowded immigration facilities in New York’s Ellis Island.

Her paintings are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Toledo Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, among others.

Interesting Facts about Martha Walter

• The quietude of Martha Walter's Paris period resulted in paintings that vivified her palette with light and shadow.
• In 1922, the French government purchased a painting of the artist’s exhibition at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris for the Musée du Luxembourg.