Popular for his specialities of domestic interiors, Venetian scenes, and winter landscapes, Walter L. Palmer received early exposure to art and artists in the home and studio of his father, the sculptor Erastus Dow Palmer. Frequent visitors there included Frederic E. Church, John F. Kensett, and Jervis McEntee. By 1870, the younger Palmer, along with Lockwood de Forest and others, was studying with Church in Hudson, New York. He continued to receive guidance from Church for several years and later shared a studio with him in the Tenth Street Building in New York.
In 1873, Palmer traveled to Europe with his family, meeting John S. Sargent, Elihu Vedder, and George Inness in Italy and studying with Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran the following year in Paris. After a brief trip home, he returned to France and the atelier of Carolus-Duran in 1876, spending the summer with fellow Americans at the Parisian suburb of Grez-sur-Loing. He returned to New York CIty, where he kept a studio for several years, but by 1881, the year of his election to the Society of American Artists, he had returned to Albany wehre he lived for the rest of his life. The same year, he made a trip to England in order to paint lavishly decorated interiors of homes, a type which had brought him success in New York. While in Europe, he spent two months in Venice with William Merritt Chase, Robert Blum, John Twachtman, and Frank Duveneck. The Venetian sojourn provided Palmer with his second signature theme, bright views of canals and gondolas. Following the awarding of the Academy's Second Hallgarten Prize to his winter landscape, January, in 1887, he also concentrated on snow scenes, a genre in which he became the acknowledged American leader.
Palmer's later life was divided between work in Albany and extensive travel in Europe, the Far East, and Mexico. He was married twice, to Georgianna Myers in 1890 and to Zoe de V. Wyndham in 1895. During the 1920s, Palmer made gifts of photographs and a bust by his father to the National Academy of Design, and he continued to submit his own works to Academy exhibitions until his death.
