Dame Ethel Walker

Dame Ethel Walker was an exceptionally talented painter, and a character. One of my favourite stories I heard about Walker was that if the artist did not like where her painting was hung within an exhibition, she would take someone else’s work down and swap it with her own. Apparently, this happened many times within exhibitions at the Royal Academy.

Walker was a celebrated artist within her own lifetime and was credited as being a leading exponent of the English Impressionist style. Not only was Walker recognised as a leading figure within her genre of painting, the artist was also admitted to the Royal Academy as an Associate Academician and was awarded a CBE in the 1930s and a DBE in the 1940s in recognition of her contribution to British art. 

The artist was a strong willed, independent woman who, not only captured the natural beauty of women within her portraits and murals, but also the natural beauty of the sea, often capturing the rough seas of the Yorkshire coast within her seascapes.

After the artists death in 1951, the art world all but forgot the talent of Dame Ethel Walker. Many reasons can be given for this fall from grace: perhaps one of those reasons was that the impressionistic style in which the artist painted was no longer fashionable, perhaps it was because she was a female artist, or perhaps it was because, as a queer woman Walker celebrated the beauty and sensuality of women within her artwork, during a period when homosexuality was still illegal.

In recent years however, the artist has started to be rediscovered by a whole new generation of art lovers after one of her works, The Excursion of Nausicaa was exhibited in Tate Britain’s exhibition, Queer British Art 1861 – 1967. As art galleries and museums continue to work on the biases and inequalities of their collections, Walker is being (re)remembered and celebrated by institutions as the independent, female, queer artist that her biography deserves.