FRANK WALTER

These paintings range in subject from miniature landscapes, many of them Scottish; to abstract explorations of nuclear energy; to portraits, both real and imagined, including seminal images of Hitler playing cricket (what else would the Führer do on a visit to Antigua? Of course, he’d play cricket like everyone else) and Charles and Diana as Adam and Eve, freshly arrived in an island paradise. His works are painted with a rare immediacy, on whatever material came to hand. ‘Man Eaten by Shark’ is on view from the Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody.  

Francis Archibald Wentworth Walter, self-styled 7th Prince of the West Indies, Lord of Follies, and the Ding-a-Ding Nook, was born in Antigua in 1926. He was prodigiously talented as both a writer and artist, but his undeniable genius was flawed by delusions of aristocratic grandeur, namely a belief that the white slave owners in his ancestry linked him to the noble houses of Europe, from Charles II to Franz Joseph of Austria and the Dukes of Buccleuch. As a young man, aged just 22 in 1948, Walter tasted success as the first man of color to manage an Antiguan sugar plantation, but although widely revered on the island for his intellect and achievements he left it all behind to tour Europe in pursuit of new skills and his own increasingly convoluted genealogical meanderings. A visit to Scotland in the ‘50s marked the beginnings of a life-long affection for a country to which he repeatedly returned in his imagination and in his paintings. Walter’s remarkable gifts were the product of a fertile, but fragile, mind and having returned to the Caribbean in the ‘60s he spent time farming a small holding of land in Dominica and running a make-shift photo-studio in the Antiguan capital St John’s. The last fifteen years of his life were lived in an isolated self-built house on an Antiguan hillside, surrounded by his writings, some 25,000 closely typed pages of history, philosophy and autobiography, and by the extraordinary paintings and carvings that speak with such an unmistakable and visionary voice.