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John Augustus Walker


John Augustus Walker (1901–1967) was a well-known Alabama Gulf Coast artist of the Depression era who was commissioned to undertake several art projects for the Works Progress Administration.

Born in Mobile, Alabama, Walker was first encouraged to become an artist by an elementary school teacher, Mayme Simpson.

Forced at an early age to become the family breadwinner, Walker worked from 1 p.m. to 1 a.m. daily for the Mobile & Ohio Freight Department, limiting his sleep so that he could devote more waking hours to the study of drawing and painting.

He began his studies under Edmund C. DeCelle (misspelled in his letter as Cecile) of Mobile.

A company-ordered transfer to St. Louis proved fortuitous for Walker, enabling him to enroll in the St. Louis School of Fine Arts, where he studied under the direction of Victor Holm, Edmund Werpel and Frederick Greene Carpenter. After six years of study, he spent several years studying art in museums in New York and Chicago. Walker also was deeply influenced by the famed painter, illustrator and muralist Frank Brangwyn.

According to a biography submitted to the University of Alabama in 1935, Walker exhibited his work at the fourteenth annual St. Louis Artists Guild Exhibition in 1926, followed by a “two-man” exhibition in Mobile in 1929 and a “one-man” exhibition at the Woman’s Club in Mobile in 1933. Both Mobile exhibitions were sponsored by Allied Arts Guild of Mobile. The Woman’s Club exhibition earned the following positive review in the Mobile Press-Register:

The water colors of John Augustus Walker on exhibition at the Woman’s Club House are among the most beautiful ever seen in Mobile. Exquisitely delicate in handling and coloring, they are an outpouring of the sensitivity and poetic spirit in which John Walker reacts to a beauty which is everywhere – a beauty from which so many now choose to turn away, seeking instead a sordid viewpoint. After all, it is with the spirit with which one sees – and in these water colors John Walker translates transcendent beauty.

Walker is remembered as an unusually tireless artist who labored long hours in his North Royal Street studio in Mobile. His paintings reflect a passion for bright colors, which he acquired from trips to Cuba and Key West — a passion reinforced by subsequent trips throughout the United States and Gulf Coast region.


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