William Aiken Walker (1838-1921)
Born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1838, William Aiken Walker was somewhat of an artistic child prodigy, exhibiting his first oil painting at the South Carolina Institute at age eleven. Over the next decade he produced numerous still lifes, fish and animal works, portraits and landscapes.
In 1860 Walker enlisted as a private in Chaleston’s Palmetto Regiment and was discharged a year later on medical grounds. He continued to serve the Confederacy, however, as a volunteer draftsman in the Engineer’s Corps, as well as continuing his own artistic activities. In 1864 Walker produced the most collectible of all American playing cards, creating miniature paintings for sixteen of the cards (including the bombardment of Fort Sumpter) and portraits of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Generals Beauregard and Jackson as the deck’s Kings. After the Civil War, Walker went traveling and moved north, ultimately settling in Baltimore in 1868.
Three years later Walker produced “Gathering Herbs” the first of his famous and highly collectible “Sunny South” genre paintings. The painting depicts a black woman in the herb garden with a basket on her arm and another on her head. For the next several decades Walker traveled extensively throughout the south during the winter months, painting scenes of former slaves in cabin and field, as well as occasional landscapes and scenes depicting the country’s white population. During this period he spent considerable time in New Orleans mass-producing these small works and hawking them on local street corners for two or three dollars each, sometimes less.
During the 1880′s and early 1890′s Walker focused his attention and brushes on the cotton trade, producing works ranging from the cotton fields to steamboat levees. In 1884 two of his large paintings, “The Levee-New Orleans” and “A Cotton Plantation on the Mississippi” were reproduced as chromolithographs by Currier and Ives.
As the century came to a close Walker returned to painting landscapes and still life subjects, but continued to produce Southern genre scenes to meet a public demand that often paid upwards of $100 for a major work, a significant sum at the time. He continued working until shortly before his death in 1921, at the end of his 81st year.
In the latter part of the 20th century numerous Walker Southern genre paintings were forged and sold as genuine to unsuspecting collectors and dealers. For a discussion of these bogus works, consult “The William Aiken Walker Affair” by David Hewett in the July 2000 issue of the Maine Antique Digest.