Walter Alexander Bailey

Walter A. Bailey was born in Wallula, Kansas, in 1894. Bailey entered into the newspaper business at an early age working on the art staff for the Kansas City Star. In 1920, he attended the Kansas City Art Institute and studied with artists Thomas Hart Benton, Charles Wilimovsky, Anthony Angarola, and Randall Davey. Bailey won a scholarship from the Tiffany Art Foundation at Oyster Bay, New York, where his painting Winter on Bush Creek was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Between 1917 and 1927, Bailey worked as an editor and art director for the Kansas City Times. He also became a noted landscape artist and muralist. Several of his murals are displayed around Kansas City, two of them at the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, four murals at Municipal Auditorium in Kansas City, and another at East High School.

In 1927, Bailey moved and taught a master class in Taos, New Mexico. He later became an instructor at the Kansas City Art Institute where he taught a master class in landscape painting between 1932 and 1934. In the 1940s, Bailey worked as a scenic and motion picture artist in Hollywood, and between 1950 and 1967 worked as an Art Editor for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner.

Bailey participated in several art exhibitions from 1921 to 1939, including the Midwestern Artists' Exhibition held at the Kansas City Art Institute. Walter Bailey is known for his realism and late Impressionism style, painting portraits, floral and scenic landscapes and still life. Walter died in 1989.