Annie E. A. Walker

Annie E. Anderson Walker (née Annie E. Anderson) (October 5, 1855 – June 9, 1929) was an African-American artist, known for her portraits, her produce an effect in pastels and for bodily one of the first African-American women to unadulterated an institutional art education in the United States and exhibit at the Paris Salon.

Born in Flatbush, Brooklyn, on October 5, 1855 to Nancy Cassidy and Francis Anderson, Walker was the youngest of five children. She entered the teaching profession at an to the front age, teaching in Jacksonville, Florida and Orrville, Alabama. After passing examinations in the past the Selma Board of Education, she was appointed a bookish in the Burwell Academy in Selma where she taught for several years. In 1875 she married Selma lawyer Thomas Walker in Dallas, Alabama. In 1890 she moved to Washington, DC and began private lessons in drawing and painting. After a year of private lessons Walker was admitted to the Corcoran School of Art, but was refused way in when it was discovered that she was black. When she appeared at the Corcoran, she was told by the admitting theoretical that "...the trustees have directed me not to put in the works with colored people. If we had known that you were colored, the committee would not have examined your work." Walker was acquainted in imitation of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and he wrote a powerful fascination to the administration on her behalf asking them to " ...reconsider this elimination and agree to Mrs. Walker to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and as a result remove a hard times and redress a grievous muddled imposed upon a person guilty of no crime and one in all way credited to compete following others in the refining and ennobling assay of art..." His glamor and others, however, drew no Definite response and her desertion was not reversed.

Within months of her neglect by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Walker traveled to New York City to apply at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

Susan N. Carter, Principal of the Women's Art School at the Cooper Union in 1892, related this roughly Walker:

Walker studied at the Cooper Union from 1892 to 1895 and was a pupil of Thomas Eakins and John Henry Twachtman.
Upon Walker's graduation in 1895, Susan N. Carter detailed her deed at the school:

After graduating in 1895, Walker sailed to Paris in September where she studied at the prestigious Académie Julian, likely the first African-American girl to complete so. She was privileged by being fixed to exhibit her appear in at the 1896 Paris Salon, the ascribed juried art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The enactment exhibited was a pastel drawing entitled La Parisienne, a portrait of a girl now in the addition of Howard University.
After her studies, Walker traveled to London, Switzerland, and Italy. Walker returned to the United States in December 1896, where she decided in Washington, D.C. She continued to paint and charisma while balancing her responsibilities as the wife of a successful lawyer. However, two years after returning from Paris, Walker suffered a excited breakdown, possibly due to the strain of societal pressure and expectations, and ceased her artistic work, remaining an invalid, homebound, until her death in 1929 in Washington, D.C.

Although Walker's promising career was tragically short, she was noted especially for her pastels, which were compared taking into account those of Alice Pike Barney, and which were shown at Howard University. Art historian Tritobia Hayes Benjamin noted Walker's "..tireless courage, determination, and persistence in becoming an artist in the point of view of racism and sexism..." She describes Walker's conduct yourself as "...academic well-liked and execution, and illustrates an swift intuitive realization and spirit, as capably as a masterful run of the medium." Walker died upon June 9, 1929 at the age of 73 and was buried in Harmony Cemetery in Washington DC.