Martha Walter (1875-1976) was a second-generation American Impressionist known for her bold and colorful painting style. She went to Europe to further her artistic education in her early thirties and revisited the continent often throughout her long life, always seeking new subjects and fresh light. She devoted her long and successful career to painting life as she saw it, with overtones of both Impressionism and Modernism, and her preferred subjects were women and children. Above all she preferred to paint directly in front of her subjects rather than working from sketches or photographs. In this way she painted at the shore, in the teeming markets of North Africa, and, in a unique series of paintings known as her Ellis Island group, inside the crowded immigration facilities on New York's Ellis Island.

A native of Philadelphia, Walter attended Girls High School. While still a student there she was admitted to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she studied with William Merritt Chase. Under Chase's guidance she began to paint with rich, saturated color and to make successful use of black, which for the most part was avoided by the Impressionists. In 1908 Walter received the Academy's Cresson Traveling Scholarship, which paid for two years of study and travel abroad. She went to Paris and enrolled in succession at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the Académie Julian, but finding Parisian academy instruction far too conservative, she left to paint Parisian cafés and park scenes en plein air. She rented a studio with other young American women who shared her views.

Walter first attracted renown for her beach scenes, a theme that had its genesis while she was in France, working on the beaches of Saint-Malo, Deauville, Trouville, and Biarritz. The onset of the First World War brought her back to the United States. She took a studio in New York City and continued to paint colorful figures at the shore by visiting Coney Island, Atlantic City, and Gloucester, Massachusetts, where she summered and opened an art school. She eventually moved back to the Philadelphia area, settling in Melrose Park, Pennsylvania.

Walter participated in the annual exhibitions of the Pennsylvania Academy over a fifty-year period, receiving its gold medal in 1923, and she also exhibited for thirty-two consecutive years in the annuals of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work was the subject of one-woman exhibitions at the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1914, the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris in 1922, and the Art Club of Chicago in 1941. Her paintings are held today in significant American museum and private collections.