FRANK WALTER

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. His remarkable gifts were the product of a fertile but fragile mind: prodigiously talented as both a writer and artist, but 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 colour to manage an Antiguan sugar plantation, but although hugely 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 early 1950s 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 most intense period of creativity came towards the end of his life, the 25 years of which were spent without electricity or running water in an isolated house on an Antiguan hillside.

He wrote more than 25,000 closely typed pages of history, philosophy and autobiography, and made several hundred extraordinary paintings and carvings: always small in scale and always speaking with an unmistakable and visionary Voice. His subject ranges from miniature landscapes to abstract explorations of nuclear energy; to portraits, both real and imagined. Painted with rare immediacy, on whatever material came to hand, they announce the discovery of one of the most intriguing and individual Caribbean artists of the last 50 years. In 2017 Frank Walter represented Antigua and Barbuda at Venice Biennale, the inaugural pavilion for these islands. In 2020, a major retrospective of several hundred works was exhibited at MMK Museum of Modern Art Frankfurt, accompanied by a significant new publication. In summer 2021 Ingleby presented an exhibition of Frank Walter’s powerful, small scale circular paintings referred to as the artist’s Spools series. A publication accompanied the exhibition with contibutions from Barbara Paca, Professor Paget Henry, Kenneth Milton and Mary-Elisabeth Moore.