The son of a lumber merchant, Horatio Walker left home at age fifteen to work in Toronto at the photography firm of William Notman and John A. Fraser. He received instruction in painting from Fraser, Robert F. Gagen, and others. Traveling to Philadelphia in 1876 to see the Centennial Exhibition, he spent the next few years in New York City, Rochester and Syracuse New York, and Toronto. In 1880 he made a six-month walking tour of the province of Quebec, where he was later to settle. During this period, Walker was developing as a painter, particularly in watercolor, but he continued to work in the photographic industry until around 1883. By then, he had probably made the first of many trips to Europe.
With Walker's marriage to Jeanette Pretty in 1883, his life took on a thirty-year pattern of winters in New York, summers on the Ile d'Orléans opposite Quebec City, and one European trip per year. By the time of his election to the Society of American Artists in 1887, his oil painting had begun to take precedence over watercolors; he took as his subjects the French-Canadian rural workers whom he considered simpler and more traditional than their Barbizon prototypes. Although he ended his European trips in 1913, Walker still traveled to New York (where his reputation was greater than in Canada) every year until 1928, when he retired on his Ile d'Orléans estate.
