David Walkley 

(1849-1934)

In the twenty-first century, man thinks of himself as more flexible: move, travel, go wherever the career leads . . . after all, it’s a small world. Consider a late 19th-century artist’s travels: Philadelphia, Cleveland, Paris, Pittsburgh, New York, Cos Cob, Port Chester, Falls Village, New London—all places where David Walkley lived, worked and dealt with family pressures. Amazingly, the artist concluded around 1900 while residing in New London that rents were too high; so, as legend has it, he rented a boat, sailed up and down the Connecticut shoreline, liked Mystic, and finally settled for an extended period. Gifted artist, but relatively rare, I’ve seen extraordinary academic genre pieces comparable to any 19th- century artist, and loosely painted, spontaneous farm and coastal scenes of marvelous Impressionist palette. Walkley clearly spanned both eras and adapted his painting style to them as well. I acquired my first example from the Greenwich Gallery in 1992 and, frankly, had not seen much of Walkley’s work. I definitely liked his exceptionally competent Connecticut farm scene with figure, cart, and draft animals better than anything I’d seen up to that moment. Candidly, since then, I’ve probably seen only one or two examples I feel are comparable. I suppose to capture the other topic that Walkley pursued, coastal imagery, the Cooley Gallery in 2000 supplied a nice harbor picture with a father and little girl walking along a path, most likely Mystic or Noank. His travels didn’t end in Mystic: the last few years of his life were in Phoenix and Rock Creek, Ohio, where he died at age eighty-five.