Description Martha Walter
(American, 1875-1976)
"Flowers from My Studio Window, Gloucester"
oil on canvas
signed lower right.
Framed.
26" x 21", framed 34-3/4" x 29-3/4"
Provenance: Heritage Auctions, Dallas, Texas, May 11, 2005, lot 23503; Frances Aronson Fine Art, Atlanta, Georgia.
Exhibited:
Impressionist Jewels. The Paintings of Martha Walter, A Retrospective. Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, September 22-November 17, 2002 (ill. in catalogue, p. 162, pl. 140).
Unbound: Narrative Art of the Plains. 12 Mar.-4 Dec. 2016, National Museum of the American Indian, New York.
Notes: Gloucester, Massachusetts, home to the oldest operating art colony in America, and home to some of the most iconic American Impressionists and Modernists from Winslow Homer and Mark Rothko, was also the residence of one of the most prominent women artists in the early 20th century - Martha Walter. A protege of William Merritt Chase at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Walter went on to win numerous awards, including the coveted Cresson Traveling Scholarship that enabled her to work throughout Europe and North Africa for two years. In Paris, she studied at the prestigious Grand Chaumiere and the Academie Julian under the direction of Rene Menard and Lucien Simon, but abandoned the restraints of academia, opening, instead, her own studio in Paris, a women artists collaborative, dedicated to plein-air studies influenced by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. The sun-drenched vistas Walter encountered in Southern France and in the French colonies of Algeria and Tunisia through the works of Boudin and Matisse drew her to the harbors and beaches of Gloucester upon her return to the United States. In 1913, she joined the Gloucester Plein-Air Art Colony and opened a studio in the General Store on Rocky Neck that she maintained for more than two decades. Together with fellow residents Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, Milton Avery and Frank Duveneck, Walter helped create a distinct genre of American Impressionism, referred to as the Cape Ann style. As art historian William Gerdts noted, "it was in Gloucester that her work began to embody to the fullest the strategic qualities of Impressionism" through her use of bold, bright colors against cool grounds to accentuate central figures or compositions of beach scenes or still-lifes, as evidenced here in the bouquet of flowers offset by the lull of the harbor waves in her rear studio window framed in blue.