Background
Walter Leighton Clark was born on January 9, 1859 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the only son of Jacob and Emma Louise Clark.
Walter Leighton Clark was born on January 9, 1859 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the only son of Jacob and Emma Louise Clark.
He revealed in boyhood a strong mechanical bent and after school days, in which he developed adeptness at cricket, he began an apprenticeship at George V. Cresson's machine shop in Philadelphia.
He spent two years at Cresson's shop, then went as a journeyman machinist to William Sellers & Company, makers of machine tools. After six months in this shop he undertook, at twenty-two, to set up and put into operation the machinery for a tanning plant at Huntingdon, for the Gondolo Tanning Company of New York. At the end of his first year he became superintendent of the tannery. He remained another year with the company, then went to the Niles Tool Works plant in Hamilton, Ohio. He was later sent to the Philadelphia office of the company and about 1884 was placed in charge of the New York office. He became in time vice-president of the company in charge of the department of sales. The Niles Tool Works gradually absorbed many of its competitors and as the Niles Bement Pond Company became the largest manufacturers of machine tools in the United States. Clark resigned from the company expecting to devote himself to his hobby, painting, but with the outbreak of the World War he went into business again. Entering the office of J. P. Morgan & Company as an engineer, he handled purchases of war supplies for the British Government, retaining at the same time a connection with the Westinghouse Electric Company as consultant. While thus engaged with the Morgan firm he received a large order for army rifles which he was unable to place. For the manufacture of these rifles he himself took over the engineering direction of a new plant near Springfield, Massachussets, as general manager of the New England Westinghouse Company. Later as one of the Shipping Board's dollar-a-year men he directed the construction and operation of a large shipyard at Portsmouth. Clark's temperament was unfavorable to narrow specialization. In youth he painted portraits in water color and cultivated a singing voice. In 1911 he began to paint as a serious avocation, at first in Robert Henri's night class and then under the tutelage of a young Russian artist named Potkin. His work became of professional quality and he exhibited it. Through his residence at Stockbridge, Massachussets, he was friendly with Daniel Chester French, who encouraged his doing sculptures. Interested in the business side of art, Clark in 1922 thought of offering to American artists a centrally situated place of exhibition where paintings and sculptures could be sold under a cooperative, non-profit plan. Thence followed, in 1923, the leasing of a vast attic space, theretofore unused at the railroad terminal, for the "Grand Central Art Galleries, Incorporated. " John Singer Sargent actively supported this enterprise, which was successful from the outset. Clark was its directing genius. More than anything else he lived to develop new ideas and put them into practical application. He died at his home in the Berkshires after an illness of five months and was buried in Stockbridge under a family monument designed by French.
Quotations: He once wrote: "I have had no single bent strong enough to keep me laboring in one field--there were too many fields under cultivation to get a really good crop from any".
He was married, on October 31, 1888, to Llewella Merrick of Germantown, by whom he had two children, Bertha and Walter Leighton.
