{{Short description|Welsh artist (1892–1951)}} {{Use dmy dates|date=April 2022}} '''Evan John Walters''' (27 November 1892 – 14 March 1951) was a Welsh artist.
==Biography== Walters was born in the Welcome Inn, between Llangyfelach and Mynydd-bach, in south Wales, to nonconformist and Welsh-speaking parents, Thomas Walters (1861-1946) and Elizabeth (Thomas)(1866-1942). The area was partly rural and partly industrial. He trained first as a painter and decorator in Morriston, Swansea, but soon progressed to the Swansea School of Art, the Regent Street Polytechnic in London and the Royal Academy Schools. He emigrated to the United States in 1915, where he was conscripted into the war effort and worked as a camouflage painter. After the Armistice he returned to Wales and established himself as a portrait painter.<ref name="ODNB">{{cite ODNB|id=101149|title=Walters, Evan John|first=Peter|last=Lord|authorlink=Peter Lord (art historian)}}</ref>
His first solo exhibition at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea in 1920 contained, among other works three pictures related to the local mining communities and proved a turning point in his career. The exhibition attracted the attention of Winifred Coombe Tennant, who would become Walters's most important patron.<ref name="ODNB"/> After meeting Walters to commission him to paint her portrait and portraits of her husband and children, she described him as "A young dark typical Welshman. Very intelligent and pleasant... He has genius."<ref name="Lord 2016">{{cite book|author=Peter Lord|author-link=Peter Lord (art historian)|publisher=Parthian|year=2006|title=The Tradition A New History of Welsh Art 1400-1990 |isbn=978-1-910409-62-6}}</ref> His fame in Wales grew when he became joint winner of a number of art prizes at the 1926 National Eisteddfod of Wales in Swansea, where Augustus John was one of the two adjudicators. Walters had designed the poster advertising the Eisteddfod but the entire print run was pulped due to a perceived sexual innuendo in the design. Winifred Coombe Tennant managed to save a single copy.<ref name="Lord 2016"/> That year he was also given a one-man exhibition in the Dorothy Warren Gallery in London, where his industrial subject manner was embraced by left-leaning critics in the wake of the General Strike.<ref name="Lord 2016"/> This and John's opinion that "a new genius had emerged" were widely reported in the London press.<ref name="ODNB"/> He was characterised as a "collier-artist", though he had never worked in the coal industry.<ref name="Lord 2016"/> During the General Strike, Walters painted ''Welsh Funeral Hymn'' showing four naked youths, marked with stigmata, on a coal tip with a choir and chapel in the background.<ref name="Lord 2016"/>
By the spring of 1936 Walters had developed a theory of perception that was to have a calamitous outcome for him. This was an investigation into "double vision" or to use the scientific term, physiological diplopia. His experimentation with producing "double vision" paintings became almost an obsession and an exhibition of November 1936 at the Coolings Gallery, London of these works was not a success and not one of the twenty- two pictures was sold.<ref>Plummer, Barry, Evan Walters: Moments of Vision, Seren, Bridgend, 2011. p. 19</ref> Walters wrote an essay on his ideas, ''The Third Dimension'', and continued to champion the theory, without any success, for the rest of his life.<ref name="Lord 2016"/>
==References== {{Reflist}}
==External links== *{{Art UK bio}}
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Walters, Evan}} Category:1892 births Category:1951 deaths Category:20th-century Welsh painters Category:20th-century Welsh male artists Category:Artists from Swansea Category:Alumni of the Royal Academy Schools Category:Welsh male painters Category:Alumni of the Regent Street Polytechnic