William Walker: 112 Masterpieces

William Aiken Walker (1839 – 1921) was an American artist best known for genre paintings depicting the lives of poor black emancipated slaves. He portrayed cabin scenes, field workers, and cotton pickers, as well as their city counterparts-market views, with fruit vendors, dock workers and newsboys. Most of his paintings were small-scale, making them portable and less costly for tourists. With an eye for the journalistic, descriptive view, Walker also painted large, detailed panoramas of southern working plantations, as well as city and river scenes in Charleston and New Orleans, several of which were published as lithographs by Currier and Ives. Walker worked in a precise and detailed realism that he adapted to figure, genre or landscape subjects. A virtuoso and prolific painter, with a charming, cultured personality, he was perhaps the most active chronicler of the post-bellum South, which he envisioned in a traditional picturesque mode of idealized scenes of city and country life, with sentimental figures.