Walter Clark's schooling began at the military academy in Brattleboro, Vermont, and continued at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, where he studied engineering until 1869. His study of art commenced that year with a trip to Europe, Egypt, India, China, and Japan. He continued his education in 1876 at the National Academy under Lemuel Wilmarth and also studied sculpture and painting for five years with J. Scott Hartley.
Among his earliest sculptural works were three terra-cotta depictions of American Indians. In 1879 he exhibited portrait busts, possibly of family members, at the National Academy and a bronze bust at the Brooklyn Art Association.
Clark soon turned most of his attention to painting landscapes, however, and began exhibiting them at the Academy in 1883, continuing to do so almost every year until his death. He also showed paintings at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901, earning a Silver Medal at the latter event. He won another Silver Medal for works exhibited at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis in 1904. His tonalist and Barbizon School tendencies show the influence of George Inness, with whom he had studied landscape painting and whose studio was not far from Clark's in New York. Appropriately, Clark won the Academy's Inness Gold Medal in 1902.
