Evan Walters

Evan John Walters (27 November 1892 – 14 March 1951) was a Welsh artist.

Biography Walters was born in the Welcome Inn, between Llangyfelach and Mynydd-bach, in south Wales, to nonconformist and Welsh-speaking parents, Thomas Walters (1861-1946) and Elizabeth (Thomas)(1866-1942). The area was partly rural and partly industrial. He trained first as a painter and decorator in Morriston, Swansea, but soon progressed to the Swansea School of Art, the Regent Street Polytechnic in London and the Royal Academy Schools. He emigrated to the United States in 1915, where he was conscripted into the war effort and worked as a camouflage painter. After the Armistice he returned to Wales and established himself as a portrait painter.

His first solo exhibition at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea in 1920 contained, among other works three pictures related to the local mining communities and proved a turning point in his career. The exhibition attracted the attention of Winifred Coombe Tennant, who would become Walters's most important patron. His fame in Wales grew when he became joint winner of a number of art prizes at the 1926 National Eisteddfod of Wales in Swansea, where Augustus John was one of the two adjudicators. Walters had designed the poster advertising the Eisteddfod but the entire print run was pulped due to a perceived sexual innuendo in the design. Winifred Coombe Tennant managed to save a single copy. Walters wrote an essay on his ideas, The Third Dimension, and continued to champion the theory, without any success, for the rest of his life.