American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists Featuring the Papageorge Family Collection

Note

Impressionist Martha Walter was born in Philadelphia in 1875. She was a student at the University of the Arts, as well as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she studied under William Merritt Chase. While at the Academy, she received the prestigious Cresson Scholarship, which allowed her to travel to Europe to continue her education. She visited Spain, the Netherlands, and Italy, before enrolling at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in France. When World War I broke out, Walter returned to the United States and began painting plein-air subjects such as Ellis Island, the fishing village of Gloucester, as well as portraits of children. She received many awards throughout her long career (she died at 101), and her work is still visible in the permanent collections of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, as well as the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Cincinnati Art Museum.

Her intimate depictions of women (often mothers) and children is what she is best known for today. Such themes earned her great critical acclaim early on in her career, as well as financial success and as such, she frequently returned to them. Coney Island on a Grey Monday Morning is a quintessential example of Walter's inimitable talent. Rendered in her typical impressionistic style and vivid palette, it perfectly captures, in the shortest and quickest dabs of paint, the world of delicacy and gentile sophistication that Walter was a part of. The oil was painted at the height of the artist's fame, and features the artist's characteristic figures at leisure, here a group of mothers and their children enjoying a joyful (albeit overcast) morning at the beach in New York. Through her expert color palette, Walter suggests the vitality of the scene and showcases her love of contrasts between soft, pastel-like hues (such as the yellows, blues and pinks used on the ice cream vendor's shirt, the benches and the children's rosy cheeks, respectively), and the bright colors surrounding them, such as the stark white swaths of paint on the beach towels, the clouds, the ladies' muslin dresses, or the jewel-like balloons floating against the sky–a joyful nod to the pure feeling of childhood as fleeting and light as the clouded weather in the work.