Martha Walter

Martha Walter (March 19, 1875 – January 1976) was an American impressionist painter. She was taught by William Merritt Chase, who painted a portrait of her in 1908. She won the school's Toppan Prize and Cresson Traveling Scholarship (1908).

Career Using the Cresson scholarship she traveled to Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and France. In France, she received tuition from Rene Menard and Lucien Simon at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.

After returning to New England, she set up a studio in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where she often painted beach scenes. She went on to teach art at Chase's New York School of Art. She often lived with one of her sisters, and sometimes traveled in the summer with Alice Schille, who she had met as an art student. The two women worked and traveled together on and off over the next twenty years, including at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts, successor to the Chase School of Art.

Walter had a show at the Galleries George Petit in Paris in 1922. The French government purchased one of her works titled The Checquered Cape.

She was lauded in her early career for her "intimate portrayal of little children" in paintings such as The Picnic and A Parasol Tea, which were noted particularly for her use of color.

In the 1930s, Walter traveled to North Africa and began to paint the market places of Tunis, Tripoli and Algiers.

Recognition Walter's 1922 painting The Telegram, Detention Room (Ellis Island) was included in the inaugural exhibition of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, American Women Artists 1830-1930, in 1987. Retrospectives showcasing her work include Martha Walter, at the George Thomas Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, TN in 1953; Martha Walter, Hammer Galleries, New York, NY, in 1974–1975; and Impressionist Jewels: The Painting of Martha Walter, A Retrospective, at the Woodmere Art museum in 2002.