Trail Site #7 : 37 Rocky Neck Avenue
DIRECTIONS: From the Gruppé Studio, the Martha Walter Studio is a short walk down and across the street, now the gallery of Judythe Evans Meagher.
One of the prominent American women artists to emerge from Philadelphia at the end of the 19th century, Martha Walter became one of the most renowned painters of bathers and women in outdoor settings, and among the best practitioners of the impressionist and post-impressionist style during the first third of the 20th century in America.
In 1896, Walter studied with William Merritt Chase at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and later at his summer school at Shinnecock, on Long Island. She won the Toppan Prize at the Academy in 1902 and the Cresson Traveling Scholarship the following year.
She went on to study in Paris at the Academie Julien, where she was the only American woman. This began a yearly trip to Europe, in what became a life-long practice that was curtailed only by the outbreak of the First World War.
By then she had begun to focus on beach scenes, both at Coney Island and Atlantic City, and more regularly at the art colony in Gloucester, which she had joined by 1913. Two small oils exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy annual of 1915, one of Coney Island and the other of Bass Rocks in Gloucester, were critically commended in the Philadelphia press* as made “wonderfully big by her manner of expressing the crowded seashore. The water is the wettest of any shown this year.” As art historian William Gerdts expresses, “it was in Gloucester that her work began to embody to the fullest the strategic qualities of Impressionism, though as William Sterling noted, “her brilliant splashes of intense color against cool grounds and almost recklessly bold brushwork brought her work close to that of the fauve painters such as Matisse and Derain.”
Walter exhibited at the Gallery-on-the-Moors in Gloucester in July 1917 and in a two-woman show with Felicie Waldo Howell in July 1919. She exhibited at the prestigious Corcoran Gallery of Art biennial of contemporary art for seven years beginning in 1907, received the Mary Smith Prize for best work by a woman artist from the Pennsylvania Academy in 1909, and enjoyed a major retrospective at the Woodmere Art Museum in 2002. She maintained her studio and gallery on Rocky Neck in the later 1910s and into the 20s and continued to visit Gloucester frequently throughout her long career.
