WILLIAM AIKEN WALKER, American, 1839-1921
La Nina de las Flores [The Little Girl of the Flowers]
San Antonio, Texas 1876
15 x 12 inches/Oil on canvas
Inscribed: initials on verso stretcher -AW-
Good condition

Provenance:

Private Collection, San Antonio, Texas from late 19th c. to 1960's, when sold to Raymond White, San Antonio [as unknown artist] until 1983; to Private Collection

Opinion:

William Aiken Walker lived and painted in Texas for several years during the 1870s. He arrived in Galveston in 1874 and spent most of his time there. In 1876, he traveled to San Antonio and lived there for perhaps four to six months before leaving Texas altogether.

From this two year period in Texas, less than ten paintings have been located and less than a handful have been published. La Nina de las Flores, a 1983 discovery, is in all probability the single known example of Walker's Texas genre scenes of street vendors. He began painting this genre with Newsboy Selling the Baltimore Sun ( 1871; High Museum of Art, Atlanta), and continuing into the 1880s with Banana Peddler of Greenville, Mississippi ( ca.1883; private collection) and Newsboy/Post No Bills ( 1883; The Warner Collection of Gulf States Paper Corporation).

La Nina portrays an alluring young street girl with her floral wares who is sitting against a wall braiding her hair. Her pose suggests that she was modeled after a 16th century Italian Madonna. The architectural feature, a wall, suggests period buildings in San Antonio, perhaps the Alamo or St. Mary's College. The girl's white skin exposed on her shoulders and arms and her brown sunburned face and feet suggest that she is possibly of mixed Mexican-European parentage, a common assimilation of San Antonio's two dominant cultures. The accurately detailed Mexican skirt, serape, blanket, and ceramic water pot all relate to the costume and crafts of San Antonio during this strongly Mexican-influenced period of the city's history. La Nina bears comparison to the San Antonio genre paintings of Theodore Gentilz (1819-1906), pioneer San Antonio artist and art teacher active in the city from 1844 to 1894.

Most notably, La Nina compares closely to Walker's similar genre painting, Newsboy Selling the Baltimore Sun. Specific affinities can be seen in numerous stylistic details: in the wide eyes; the mouth with teeth showing through the lips; the rosy cheeks; the treatment of the nose; the detailed treatment of clothing and objects; the careful flat application of paint; the straight-forward anatomical rendering and general positioning of arms and legs; the carefully rendered architectural detail and the juxtaposition of sidewalk to wall with the integrated figure. Clearly, we see Walker's careful compositional style which evolved into its fullest development in his trademark genre scenes of Southern Blacks working in cottonfields.

Walker's only published San Antonio painting, San Jose Mission (1876; Witte Museum, San Antonio) is an architecturally focused picture with small figures in the landscape, comparing closely with his earlier architectural paintings, Circular Church in Ruins (1868; private collection) and St Finbar's Roman Catholic Cathedral (1868; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston). The Mexican man and woman in the foreground of San Jose Mission are shown with particular costume details and suggest Walker's specific depiction of local color in La Nina. La Nina de las Flores is a great rarity among Texas paintings from this "Old West" period and the evidence further suggests that it is a significant addition to William Aiken Walker's body of work.

Fred R. Kline