Dame Ethel Walker DBE ARA (9 June 1861 – 2 March 1951) was a Scottish painter of portraits, flower-pieces, sea-pieces and decorative compositions.

Walker achieved considerable success throughout her career, becoming the first female member elected to the New English Art Club in 1900.

[1] Walker is now acknowledged as a lesbian artist, a fact which critics have noted is boldly apparent in her preference for women sitters and female nudes.

[5] While Walker was contemporarily regarded as one of the foremost British women artists, her influence diminished after her death, perhaps due in part to her celebration of female sexuality.

[8][9][10] Made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1943, Walker was one of only four women artists to receive the honour as of 2010.

Walker produced a large body of works from different genres, to include flowers, seascapes, landscapes and mythical subjects.

Her obvious, tactical brush strokes obscure unnecessary details, thereby allowing her to emphasize the aspects of the mood of the moment.

Walker painted fellow artists Lucien Pissarro, Nicolette Macnamara and Orovida Camille Pissarro, as well as society figures including the American-British politician Nancy Astor, the Countess of Strathcona and the magazine and book editor Joan Werner Laurie and author Leo Walmsley.

[32] The influential Irish novelist, writer, and critic George Moore recognised Walker's talent, and introduced her to French Impressionism when she met him in Paris returning to London from a visit to Spain.

Moore later lent Walker use of his flat in Victoria Street, London, where she painted Angela, which saw her accepted to the New English Art School.

[33] Among Walker's friends was the writer William Rothenstein, who in March 1935 honoured Walker with a dinner at the Belgrave Hotel attended by some seventy guests, including Bloomsbury Group members Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell, alongside fellow artists Wilson Steer and Henry Tonks.

[36] Walker painted Woolf's sister Bell in 1937, seated in a domestic interior possibly being that of Charleston Farmhouse.

[12] One friend recollected: ‘She executed commissions when she liked the look of the would-be sitters but before painting her women she would say “Take that filthy stuff off your lips” for, always faithful to the motif, she could not tolerate the sudden assault of red upon an eye so sensitive to tone'.

[22] Speaking to the art dealer Lillian Browse, Walker stated, 'if you take that filthy stuff off your face [lipstick] I would like to paint a portrait of you'.

[41] In her eighties, Walker befriended the Polish artist Marian Kratochwil, who had fled occupied Europe and arrived penniless in London in 1947.

[43] Upon Walker's death, Kratochwil learnt that she had secretly made him beneficiary of her estate, which included the remaining canvases in her studio.

[64] In 2017, Walker's large work Decoration: The Excursion of Nausicaa was included in the Tate Britain exhibition Queer British Art 1861-1967.