Henry Walton (1804-1865)

Inscribed verso, ink stamp: PREPARED BY/EDWARD DECHAUX/NEWYORK.

Frank Ganci, Schooleys Mountain, New Jersey
Avis and Rockwell Gardiner, Stamford, Connecticut, 1985
Marjorie Schorsch, Greenwich, Connecticut

"Small Folk: A Celebration of Childhood in America," American Folk Art Museum and New-York Historical Society, 1980-1981
"Young America: A Folk Art History," American Folk Art Museum at IBM Gallery of Science and Art, New York, 1986
“Artist of Ithaca: Henry Walton and His Odyssey," Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 1988-1989

Brant, Sandra, and Elissa Cullman, Small Folk: A Celebration of Childhood in America, New York: E.P. Dutton in association with the American Folk Art Museum, 1980, frontispiece, p. 29 
Jones, Leigh Rehner, Artist of Ithaca: Henry Walton and His Odyssey, Ithaca, New York: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1988, p. 36
Lipman, Jean, Elizabeth V. Warren, and Robert Bishop, Young America: A Folk Art History, New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with the American Folk Art Museum, 1986, p. 20
American Radiance: The Ralph Esmerian Gift to the American Folk Art Museum, p. 74, fig. 44

Unlined original frame and stretcher. Small arc of in-paint above eldest girl's head and in foliage at extreme left.
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Henry Walton captured these three beautiful children in a moment of repose from their play outdoors. Having just picked flowers from the garden, the older sister and her young sibling grasp small posies of delicate blooms while sitting stoically on a white bench. Their sister stands at the right, patiently holding a little kitten in her arms. The ball of yarn unraveled at their feet and a dropped flower convey the immediacy of the scene and the innocent nature of the girls' childish play. Dating from about 1838, this painting portrays the two older girls dressed in gowns with off-the-shoulder necklines, pleated bodices, and sleeves sewn tightly at the tops of their arms, in keeping with costume details of the period. The red coral necklace worn by the young one standing at the right was believed to ward off illness in children.¹
Nothing is known about these three subjects except that they probably lived in the Finger Lakes region of New York, an area where Henry Walton worked from the late 1830s until about 1850.² Born in 1804 in Ballston Spa, New York, Walton descended from New York City's mercantile elite; his grandfather and great-uncle were among the founders of the New York Chamber of Commerce. Once identified by artist John Vanderlyn (1775-1852) as a great "lover of the fine arts," the painter's father, Henry Walton Sr., settled portions of Saratoga County, where he relocated his family, bringing high culture and urban refinement to the unsettled frontier of western New York.³
Walton's career as an artist must have resulted, in part, from his father's interest in the fine arts.⁴ Beginning in the 1820s, Henry Jr. made etchings and lithographs depicting scenes in Saratoga Springs that were published by printing firms, including Rawdon Clark & Company and Rawdon Wright & Company of Albany and the John and William Pendleton Company of Boston and New York.⁵ Land speculation drew Walton in the early 1830s to the Michigan Territory, where he purchased property and resided intermittently throughout his life until his death in 1865 at the age of sixty. During these years, he made trips west to California for gold in the 1850s and east in summers from 1836 until 1851 to execute portraits of local residents and scenes of daily life in northern Pennsylvania, the Finger Lakes region, and the southern tier of New York State.⁶
When in New York, the artist often made Ithaca his center of business, traveling from this venue in search of commissions to towns including Lodi, Dryden, McLean, and Groton. According to one review of his paintings and drawings, published in the Ithaca Journal for May 23, 1838, Walton's work, in design and execution, "displayed genius and skill worthy of liberal patronage."⁷ Further, his portraits displayed a "beauty of design [that] was only equaled by the neatness and elegance of execution." "In a word," this commentator observed, "his specimens speak for themselves, and they plainly show that he is a master of his profession, and we unhesitatingly say, that Mr. Walton ought to be patronized by every lover and patron of the fine arts."
Besides executing portraits in watercolor on paper or ivory or in oil on canvas, as in this composition, during these years Walton also made a firemen's parade banner depicting Ithaca's Great Fire of 1840, painted town views of Painted Post, New York, and Athens and Troy, Pennsylvania, and continued to work in lithography by generating scenes of Jefferson (now Watkins Glen), Addison, and Elmira, New York, among other subjects.⁸

-C.E.M.

¹ Abbey Hansen, "Coral in Children's Portraits: A Charm against the Evil Eye," The Magazine Antiques 120, no. 6 (December 1981): 1424-31.
² Unless otherwise noted, biographical information based on Leigh Rehner jones, Artist of Ithaca: Henry Walton and His Odyssey (Ithaca, N.Y.: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell Univ., 1988), and Ithaca College Museum of Art, Henry Walton, Nineteenth-Century American Artist (Ithaca, N.Y.: Ithaca College Museum of Art, 1968).
³ Letters from John Vanderlyn to his nephew john Vanderlyn Jr., dated April 6 and May 21, 1834, in the Hoes and the Darrow Collections, respectively; transcripts in the archives of the Senate House State Historic Site, Kingston, N.Y., as quoted in Jones, Artist of Ithaca, p. 6, n. 9.
⁴ In 1835 and 1836, Henry Sr. installed Vanderlyn's two-thousand-foot canvas entitled Panorama of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles in a rotunda he built in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., next to his mineral spring, Flat Rock Spring, a noteworthy tourist attraction; see Jones, Artist of Ithaca, pp. 7-8, pp. 28, 29.
⁵ See, for example, View of the Celebrated Rock Spring at Saratoga, delineated by Moses Swett (c. 1804-1838) and published in Boston by Pendleton, in ibid., p. 16.
⁶ In all, Walton executed five known works of art while in California, including William D. Peck, Rough and Ready, California; View of Rose's Bar, Yuba County, California, November 1853; and View of Grass Valley, Nevada Co., Cal., From the N East Hill, 1857; see ibid., pp. 75-77.
⁷ First quoted in Albert W. Force, "H. Walton-Limner, Lithographer, and Map Maker," Antiques 82, no. 3 (March 1962): 284-87.
⁸ See Jones, Artist of Ithaca, p. 39, fig. 34; p. 73. fig. 87; p. 74, figs. 88, 89; p. 67, fig. 77;p. 72, fig. 84; and p. 68, fig. 78, respectively.