William Aiken Walker (American, 1838-1921), Cotton Workers

Willaim Aiken Walker (American, 1838-1921)
William Aiken Walker was an American artist best known for genre paintings of black sharecroppers. He also documented the American civil ware era during his service in the confederate army. William Aiken Walker was born to an Irish Protestant father and a mother of South Carolina background in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1861, during the American Civil War, Walker was conscripted into the Confederate Army and was sent to Morris Island as part of the Palmetto Guard. Almost immediately, Walker was sent on to Richmond and Camp Davis. He was medically discharged from the army four months later. For the remainder of the war, he served as a civilian draftsman to the Confederate Engineers Corps and made maps and drawings of Charleston’s defenses. After the Civil War, Walker moved to Baltimore, where he produced small paintings of the “Old South” to sell as tourist souvenirs. He is best known for his paintings depicting the lives of poor black emancipated slaves, especially sharecroppers in the post-reconstruction American South.