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Otto W. Beck

American

BiographyBorn near Dayton, Ohio, Walter Beck became a well-known late 19th century painter, etcher, muralist and sculptor with a wide range of subject matter that included figure, marine and a series of Civil War portraits. In the 1930s he turned his talents to landscape design and began building Innisfree, one of the premier gardens in the United States located in the Hudson River Valley near Millbrook, New York. During most of his career, he was based in New York.

As a child he played with the veterans of the Civil War who were living in a Dayton Soldiers' Home, and his imagination was stirred by the stories he heard of their lives. An early drawing, inspired by one of these stories, was submitted to and accepted by a Cincinnati newspaper, and this set the course of his career.

He had no art training until the age of 22 when a local art patron, Mrs. J B Thresher sponsored him. His early art training was with Isaac Broome of Trenton, New Jersey, and then he went to Europe where he studied painting and sculpture at the Munich Academy. Beck returned from Europe in 1892 and taught at the Art Institute of Cincinnati. The artist also gave lectures and published a book on photography. In 1897 he won a competition to paint murals for the Cincinnati City Hall. He married Caroline Peabody Perkins, whose father was principal of the Adelphi College in Brooklyn.

After moving to New York City, he taught at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and was a member of the Architectural League and the National Arts Club. In 1914 he was awarded a commission to paint 80 life-size portraits of Civil War veterans which were exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution. Many of these are in the National Gallery in Washington D.C.

In 1921 Walter Beck perfected a new painting technique using starch which the critics hailed as a major advance in creative expression. The artist soaks a piece of white blotting paper in water, rolls out the excess water then quickly coats it with hot starch. The artist next applies liquid tempera before the starch cools. The technique gives the artist greater fluidity of movement.

In the same years as Beck mastered his starch-film technique his wife died.
He remarried the following year to Marion Burt Stone. The couple bought land near Millbrook, New York in the Hudson River Valley which they called Innisfree. It was there that Beck worked on his starch-film paintings and eventually designed the famous gardens.

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