Roger King Fine Art to Present a Selection of Works by David Walkley

06-Apr-2009

During 2009, Roger King Fine Art will present a selection of works by David Walkley from the collection of the artist's descendants. Click here to view work featured in the exhibit.

Associated with the Connecticut Impressionists, David Walkley was a significant figure in the New York and New England art scenes, exhibiting with Frank Benson, Cecilia Beaux, Edmund Tarbell, Charles Courtney Curran. He was a colleague of Henry Ranger, J. Eliot Enneking, and Charles Harold Davis. The paintings are part of a private collection belonging to the artist's granddaughter, a Rhode Island resident, and include oil sketches, portraits, genre studies, and landscapes around Mystic, Connecticut and Holland. In his portraits of Dutch country people Walkley's sensitivity is evident and it comes as no surprise to learn that he sometimes supported himself on portrait commissions.

Born in Ohio, Walkley was a descendant of Connecticut settlers; Walkley Hill in Haddam was named after the family. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and in Paris at the Academie Mosler and the Academie Julian with Boulanger and Lefebvre. He was head of life design classes at the Pittsburgh School of Design but left to paint full-time in New York City, where he continued to study at the Art Students’ League with William Merritt Chase. In New York he met his future wife, Alice May Remington, who was one of his students. Seeking a suitable place to raise a family, the Walkleys sampled country life in the Connecticut towns of Cos Cob, Falls Village, and New London before settling in Mystic. Many of the paintings Walkley did in Mystic feature his young daughters, who frequently modeled for him from childhood to early adulthood.  But Walkley's work often took him to Europe, leaving May and his daughters at home. One of his favorite countries was Holland, a destination shared by many American artists who considered the Netherlands "the artistic paradise of the old world."

Walkley's Impressionistic works of young women in dappled woods recall the style of Frieseke, Ritman and other American Impressionists. It is difficult to appreciate now how risky it was at the turn of the 20th century for an American artist to paint in the Impressionist style, which was widely reviled and ridiculed. But Walkley's work seemed to satisfy American critics and he enjoyed many successful exhibits. While some critics conceded that "Mr. Walkley inclines toward the French school, a modified impressionism." Others celebrated his "rich... color and... dash and impressionism that suggest a rapid sketch at one sitting." As one critic declared, "Mr. Walkley is too clever a man to carry his ideas to the extremes attained by some of the fanatics of his profession. The whole Walkley collection is extremely varied character; beautiful, clear, sunlit skies standing side by side with suggestions of tempest and gloomy night."