Walter Paris

Background

Walter Paris was born on February 28, 1842 in London, England, United Kingdom.

Education

Walter Paris studied in the Royal Academy in England.

Career

From about 1866 to 1870 Walter Paris was an architect in the service of the British government in India. About 1872 he came to the United States and in 1894 became a naturalized citizen. He was known in this country as a painter of water colors rather than as an architect, and as an amateur violinist. For the first few years after arrival in America he lived in New York, occupying a studio in Union Square, then made his home in Washington, D. C. , for the rest of his life. It was in his New York studio that the famous Tile Club was organized. This club, picturesquely described by F. Hopkinson Smith in his novel, The Fortunes of Oliver Horn (1902), was fashioned after artist clubs in Germany and Austria and numbered among its members such men of later fame as Edwin A. Abbey, Frank D. Millet, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Elihu Vedder, and Alden Weir.

His paintings were exquisitely dainty, and although he prided himself on his breadth of style, his work was done painstakingly with minute attention to detail. His subjects to a great extent were rural English scenes painted, doubtless, from his own early sketches and memory, showing picturesque thatched cottages with flowery dooryards or well-kept kitchen gardens, blossoming hedgerows, and neat roadways. Possibly because of popular demand, he painted these over and over again. A notable exception, however, was a picture painted in gouache (which he seldom used) of the great blizzard of 1899, showing the State, War, and Navy Department Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, in a whirl of snow, a very difficult theme, most skilfully rendered. This painting is now in the permanent collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, which also owns Walter Paris' picture of Marcia Burns's cottage, an historical Washington landmark. He died November 26, 1906, in a hospital in Washington, as the result of a stroke which occurred ten days earlier.

Achievements

• Walter Paris became eminent for his series of flower studies in water color made from nature as aids to design. He painted such notable works as A stormy sea with rocks, Artist's Van Ness Mansion, Washington, D. C. (1893), Stream cascading over rock, Scott circle, 16th street and Massachussetts (1895), Water lilies (1896), Seaside Shacks, Old Cottage in the Woods, etc.

Membership

Walter Paris was a member of the Washington Water Color Club and other professional organizations.

Personality

Walter Paris was a large man, broad-shouldered, well-built, and wore moustache and full beard squarely cut. He had a dignity which verged on pomposity and was slow and heavy in movement and speech, the latter distinctly British in accent. He was intolerant of criticism, but this characteristic also may have been only the armor worn to protect a supersensitive nature. Walter Paris always held himself somewhat aloof from his professional colleagues.

Interests

• Walter Paris played on the violin with taste and intelligence, evidencing thorough training and sensitiveness of feeling, the latter again contradicting the impression given by his stiff manner.

• Music & Bands

  Walter Paris played on the violin with taste and intelligence, evidencing thorough training and sensitiveness of feeling, the latter again contradicting the impression given by his stiff manner.

Connections

Walter Paris was unmarried.