Arts and Letters

When Walter Stuempfig came to the school of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at the age of seventeen, he customarily wore a dark suit, a chesterfield coat with velvet collar, and a hunter's bowler, with a tightly rolled umbrella hung over one wrist. The look was that of the gentleman artist, with a little extra. He walked at a rather quickened pace, as though his presence was awaited. And when he was in the school he drew and painted with eagerness. There was no time to loll on the back stairs, nor time to converse in the hallway more than briefly.

Walter was a Philadelphian from Germantown. At the Academy he met Lila Hill, a sculpture student, who also lived in Philadelphia on the Main Line. If you were in the company of former Academy students of the early nineteen thirties you would soon hear of Walter and Lila, of Walter's cultivated impressive manner and Lila's sweet and gentle radiance. Lila was the inspirational spirit.

A year or two after Walter won a Cresson Traveling Scholarship at the Academy, he and Lila were married. They lived near Collegeville, and Walter painted in Phoenixville and Norristown and during the summers in Cape May, New Jersey, sometimes painting a Phoenixville house on a Cape May beach.

Walter and Lila had two boys, George and Tony. They were still small when Lila died. The loss brought grief to Walter which I feel lingered on for the balance of his life. Lila's death changed Walter in more ways than one. Shortly afterward he said he would never paint again, but this mood did not last. After he moved to the little house on Evergreen Street in Chestnut Hill, formerly occupied by Arthur Carles, he began painting once more and started in to do his best work. After several years he married again, but this marriage was of short duration. Meanwhile his work went forward, both in his studio at Evergreen Street and at Penllyn, where he stayed near his friend and patron Sturgis Ingersoll. At this period he also came to be known as a delightful host; he entertained notable Philadelphians at luncheons and black tie dinners, sometimes with distinguished visitors to Philadelphia as guests of honor.

When he went down to Manayunk to paint he would leave Chestnut Hill as Mr. Stuempfig, but when he pulled up in Manayunk, he was greeted as Walt by the small boys who vied with one another as to who would carry his canvas, paints, and brushes. They were of course rewarded; even those who followed along received something for their willingness.

As time went on Walter alternated his summers between southern Italy and the New Jersey shore, but most of the year he painted in his studio, especially at Penllyn, for there was always someone around, usually from Conshohocken, to pose, as well as to help mow the lawn and the meadow and act as chauffeur on formal occasions.

Walter Stuempfig was robustly elegant, talented, knowledgeable, and witty. Lucius Crowell, perhaps his closest friend, writes, "about his wit—completely spontaneous, with penetrating insight. He never told stories or long-winded jokes, as I remember—but he would say things that would break you up for a week." With his students he could be most considerate or he could be very forthright. He was on the Pennsylvania Academy's school faculty from 1946 until his death.

Walter especially liked the paintings of Corot and Caravaggio, and generally was interested in what he called the close values of the late Italian Renaissance painters. He fully appreciated the placing of mythological figures in Poussin and the scholarly arrangements in Mantegna. But it was first the look of a picture that gave him pleasure. The same was true in architecture, whether it was a temple in Paestum, the dome of Saint Peter's in early Corot paintings echoed in the courthouse dome in Norristown, or the arches and surfaces of the old "Chinese Wall" in Philadelphia. Regarding city planners, Walter took the position that they were too prone to tear down the beautiful and replace it with something not as rewarding to the eye.

Beginning soon after he was out of school, and continuously, Walter's paintings have sold well, both to museums and to private collectors. Louis Bouché said that on Long Island a collector would buy a Picasso and then balance it with a Stuempfig.

During the past several years Walter was in poor health and it was difficult for him to get about or to stand at his easel, which was the way he preferred to work. Nevertheless during the past summer and autumn he painted a surprisingly large number of pictures along the New Jersey shore. One of his pupils who was in Ocean City recently where Walter was living at the home of his aunt, tells of going with him to Cape May; Walter would sit in the car, holding a canvas with one hand and painting with the other. Apparently the method was quite successful. His show at the Larcada Gallery during November, which closed only a few days before Walter's death, was made up almost entirely of these last paintings.