Martha Walter studied under the influential teacher William Merritt Chase (1849-1916) at Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she was awarded the prestigious Cresson Scholarship for European Travel. She then studied in Paris at the Grande Chaumière and the Académie Julian. By the time she returned to the United States at the outbreak of World War I, Walter was producing Impressionistic paintings executeden plein air, which would remain her speciality for the rest of her long career. In 1922 she had an exhibition at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris, from which the French government purchased a painting for the Musée du Luxembourg. Her paintings are now in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy, and the Toledo Museum of Art. The Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia mounted Walter’s first retrospective in 1955 and her most recent museum show in 2002. REFERENCE: W. Douglass Paschall, Impressionist Jewels: The Paintings of Martha Walter (Philadelphia: Woodmere Art Museum, 2002)