Martha Walter was among the most accomplished women artists of the American
Impressionist movement. After studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts under
William Merritt Chase—who had a profound influence on her early career and style as the
artist’s favorite instructor and mentor—and later in Paris at the Académie de la Grande
Chaumière and the Académie Julian, Walter spent several decades travelling to over fifteen
countries in Europe and North Africa, painting sympathetic scenes of different peoples and
cultures. She has been described as the “most talented, long-lived, and well-traveled
Philadelphia Impressionists who ever lived,” and found both national and international
success during her lifetime, exhibiting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, the
Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, the biennial exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in
Washington DC, the National Academy of Design in New York, and the Paris Salon.

Walter is perhaps best known for her bright and loosely painted beach, street, and
park scenes—usually set in America or France—which invited comparisons with her
contemporary, Joaquín Sorolla, then at the height of his fame. In addition to these joyous
scenes, she painted sober and somber subjects—the most famous being her images of
immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, numbering over 55 canvases. Although portraiture
constitutes only a limited portion of her artistic output, Walter was an accomplished
painter of portraits and character studies, rendering her subjects with great sensitivity and
infusing them with movement and life. The present full-length portrayal of an elegant
woman in profile is a striking and unusual work from early in the artist’s career. The
subject has traditionally been thought to represent Alice Schille (1869–1955), Walter’s
friend and fellow student at the Pennsylvania Academy, and later her traveling companion.


However, no firm documentation of the painting’s title is known, and the painting
appears never to have been exhibited; it remained in the artist’s possession until her death
in 1976 at age 99.

The figure wears a flowing dress with a high white collar, paired with a wide
brimmed hat perched dramatically atop her gently inclined head. She holds a black-andwhite striped parasol—resting the tip on the ground like a walking stick—which contrasts
beautifully with the muted green of her dress. Parasols were a distinctive trademark of
Walter’s art, appearing in a wide range of paintings but especially in beach scenes and
portraits as an emblem of femininity. Executed on a monumental scale, this impressive
portrait of a fashionable woman reveals the influence of Walter’s teacher, William Merritt
Chase, who had a profound impact on her early career and style as the artist’s favorite
instructor and mentor. This suggests an early date for this painting in the first years of the
20th century. Its romantic evocation of a fashionable but solitary woman of the Edwardian
age stands in vivid contrast to the Impressionist subjects for which the artist is better
known.

Martha Walter began studying with Chase at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine
Arts in 1896 or shortly thereafter, and she also spent two summers at Chase’s Shinnecock
School of Art in Southampton in 1899 and 1900. Walter’s close connection to Chase is
revealed by the inscription in her hand preserved on the reverse of one of her paintings of
a woman at Shinnecock, which reads: “1st year me painting with Chase. He offered to
exchange pictures with me; an honor! He took another quite a bit like this.” It is likely
that Walter received in exchange for her painting the engaging bust-length portrait of her
by Chase.

The stylistic ties between our painting and Chase’s portraits include the bravura
brushwork and the dark palette, which Chase absorbed through intensive study of
Baroque painting. The spare setting and atmospheric treatment of the background, as well
as the high horizon line, can be traced back to James McNeil Whistler, whom Chase had
met in London in 1885, the year of Chase’s celebrated portrait of Whistler, now in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Chase’s full-length female portraits of the late 1880s and
1890s are clearly indebted to Whistler, and have been described as “characterized by a
subtly modulated palette accented by shots of brilliant colour, a simple, soft and
atmospheric background and brushwork that is lively but not overbearing.” This
description could easily be applied to our portrait by Martha Walter, whose descent from
this artistic lineage is here wholly felt. In addition to Chase’s role in her development,
Walter’s style was later undoubtedly influenced by her early travels to Europe through
prizes she was awarded at the Pennsylvania Academy for her paintings, studying in Paris and also traveling to museums in the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy,
and Spain, where she briefly worked as a copyist at the Prado.


It was as a portraitist that Walter found some of her earliest success, having been
awarded the Mary Smith Prize at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1909 for an untraced
painting simply titled Portrait. This generic title points to one of the main issues with
reconstructing Walter’s activity as a portraitist. The majority of portraits exhibited by
Walter are listed in exhibition catalogues without dimensions or the identity of the sitter.
Furthermore, by its scale and its avoidance of physiognomic details, paintings such as ours
may well have been painted specifically for exhibition purposes rather than as a private
commission.