Much as once a week I like to take time off to cover warships (Wednesdays), on Sundays (when I feel like working), I like to cover military art and the painters, illustrators, sculptors, and the like that produced them.
Combat Gallery Sunday : The Martial Art of Walter L. Greene
Born in Schenectady, New York, in 1870, Walter L. Greene studied drawing and illustration at Massachusetts State Normal School Academy of Art in Boston (now called Massachusetts College of Art and Design). After continuing his education in Europe, he returned to the states and in his 30s became the board artist first for General Electric and then for the New York Central Railroad.
Over the next several decades, he specialized in railway and maritime art for publication by his companies, producing posters, calendars, post cards, magazine ads and the like that had an eye for blending the most modern machines of the day with the mysteries of old to give the impression that industry was magical.
Eastward, Westward
One of several original oil paintings by Schnectady artist Walter L. Greene commissioned by the New York Central Railroad to be reproduced as a travel poster advertising passenger service to the Adirondacks and Lake Placid, New York.
S.S. President Hoover on the Yangtze River,Shanghai
Although his military work was limited, he did create an amazing set of paintings of the most modern warships of their day, to include the turbine-electric USS Saratoga (CV-3) and the USS New Mexico (BB-40)
Saratoga by Walter green 1927
The Electric Ship, New Mexico (BB-40), painting by Walter L. Greene.
GE ad from the Electric Ship painting, published 1920
Greene passed in 1956, long after Saratoga was obliterated and sunk in the A-bomb tests at Bikini Atoll and New Mexico broken up for scrap in Newark.
Today his industrial work is celebrated by train enthusiasts while a number of his paintings are in the Navy Art Collection and on display at the Albany Institute of History and Art, New York, Arkell Museum at Canajoharie, New York, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum National Art Inventories.
Thank you for your work, sir.
