The St. Louis School of Fine Arts
A company-ordered transfer to St. Louis proved fortuitous for Walker, enabling him to enroll in the St. Louis School of Fine Arts, where he studied under the direction of Victor Holm, Edmund Werpel and Frederick Greene Carpenter. After six years of study, he spent several years studying art in museums in New York and Chicago. Walker also was deeply influenced by the famed painter, illustrator and muralist Frank Brangwyn.
According to a biography submitted to the University of Alabama in 1935, Walker exhibited his work at the fourteenth annual St. Louis Artists Guild Exhibition in 1926, followed by a “two-man” exhibition in Mobile in 1929 and a “one-man” exhibition at the Woman’s Club in Mobile in 1933. Both Mobile exhibitions were sponsored by Allied Arts Guild of Mobile. The Woman’s Club exhibition earned the following positive review in the Mobile Press-Register:
The water colors of John Augustus Walker on exhibition at the Woman’s Club House are among the most beautiful ever seen in Mobile. Exquisitely delicate in handling and coloring, they are an outpouring of the sensitivity and poetic spirit in which John Walker reacts to a beauty which is everywhere – a beauty from which so many now choose to turn away, seeking instead a sordid viewpoint. After all, it is with the spirit with which one sees – and in these water colors John Walker translates transcendent beauty.
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