Walter Appleton Clark

Walter Appleton Clark (June 24, 1876 – December 26, 1906) was an performer and illustrator.

Clark was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, four years past the death of his father. His mommy then made a active for her family by taking in borders. As a child, Clark drew sketches for his own amusement, and at fifteen, he spent a profitable summer in Jackson, New Hampshire, taking drawing lessons from a local artist. After finishing high school, Clark studied at Worcester Polytechnic Institute for two years since enlisting at the Massachusetts Nautical Training School to become an manager in the U.S. Merchant Marine. In 1894, Clark resigned as a cadet in good standing and enrolled at the Art Students League of New York, where he studied under William Merritt Chase and Harry Siddons Mowbray. Among Clark's intimate connections there were fellow students John Wolcott Adams and James Montgomery Flagg.

Joseph H. Chapin, the art editor of Scribner's Magazine, discovered one of Clark's drawings on a classroom wall and gave him his first commission, to illustrate a story by Rudyard Kipling. In 1899, after achieving curt success illustrating books and magazine stories, Clark returned to the Art Student League as a teacher. He moreover taught briefly at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Clark won medals at the 1900 Paris Exposition and the Pan-American Exposition of 1901. In New York, he shared a studio in the same way as the writer Guy Wetmore Carryl and illustrated two of his stories.

In 1902, Clark married Anne "Nancy" Hoyt of Greenwich, Connecticut, and the subsequent to year the couple moved to France, where they lived in Paris and Giverny. There Clark continued to contribute to American magazines and worked on a series of paintings illustrating Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, six of which were published in Percy MacKaye, Canterbury Tales (New York: Fox Duffield & Co., 1904). Clark considered the paintings "his most important work; and as a presage of what he might have done through the larger medium of oils, they undoubtedly are."

In 1905, the Clarks returned to New York where Walter regularly met subsequently his friend, James Montgomery Flagg, the men brute engaged in parallel jobs as magazine illustrators. Clark's marriage was a happy one despite his occasional melancholy, and the Clarks were severely regarded in the middle of a wide circle of friends, many who were, or would become, prominent in literature or art.

In 1906, Clark suffered for seven weeks taking into consideration typhoid fever and died after surgery for appendicitis on the day after Christmas. He was abandoned thirty, though he had already "established himself as a time and versatile artist."