WILLIAM AIKEN WALKER
(American, 1838-1921)

During the 1880s, William Aiken Walker produced a prodigious quantity of genre paintings featuring the lives and labors of African Americans on Southern plantations.  These trademark works, whether of significant size and meticulously detailed, or the more common small cabin scenes and single figure works marketed on the street as souvenir postcards, were bestsellers at popular tourist attractions in the late 19th century.
 
William Aiken Walker: Southern Genre Painter by August Trovaioli and Roulhac Toledano was published in 1972 by LSU Press.  In conjunction with the publication of this book and in response to increased interest in the artist, the Louisiana State Museum organized the exhibition “The World of William Aiken Walker.”  The impressive work offered here was illustrated in both the original and second printings of the monograph and served as a highlight of the Louisiana State Museum exhibition.

While Walker’s oeuvre is extensive, his paintings of this scale, detail and scope are incredibly rare.  Works by William Aiken Walker are held in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Yale University Art Gallery; Virginia Museum of Fine Art; High Museum of Art; the Parrish Art Museum; Morris Museum of Art; Historic New Orleans Collection and numerous other important museum and institutional collections.
 
Reference: Seibels, Cynthia and Robert M. Hicklin Jr., The Sunny South: Life and Art of William Aiken Walker, Spartanburg: University of South Carolina Press, 1995.

Trovaioli, August P. and Roulhac B. Toledano, William Aiken Walker: Southern Genre Painter, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972.

Trovaioli, August P. and Roulhac B. Toledano, William Aiken Walker: Southern Genre Painter, New Orleans: Pelican Publishing Company, 2008.

Hoeing Cotton | Choppin’ the Patch

oil on canvas, signed lower right, Louisiana State Museum exhibition label en verso, 12 x 20 in. Framed 17 1/2 x 27 1/2 in.
Provenance: Don Didier, New Orleans, LA; Private Collection, El Dorado, AR.  
Exhibited: "The World of William Aiken Walker," Louisiana State Museum, Presbytere, New Orleans, LA, Dec. 1972 - Jan. 1973.

NOTES:
The expansive scene encompasses nine figures working in a cotton field in the foreground with a low horizon line and structures in the background.  The same figure with a striped hat lower right can be found in the Currier and Ives lithograph of Walker’s famous “Southern Cotton Plantation,” while the bonneted woman is painted after a known photograph taken by the artist.  Walker’s artistic aptitude in capturing the individuality of each of the figures as well as the unique natural landscape is poignantly displayed.

This canvas stands out as one of the artist’s masterworks – a testament to his skill as the premier genre painter of the American South.