Attributed to Walter Henry Williams, no coa, private collection, medium: oil, measurements: 21"HX27"W framed, mint condition Biography: Walter Henry Williams Jr. was an African American-born artist, painter, printmaker and ceramicist who became a Danish citizen later in his life. Williams participated in several exhibits in the early 1950s. In 1953, he won a third prize gold medal for his painting “On the Railing” in the fourth annual exhibit for artists and students of New York City at the Harlem Branch of the YWCA. He was 32 years old, lived in Englewood, New Jersey, and was a student at the Brooklyn Museum school. The speaker at the event was artist Charles White.That same year, he participated in a group show at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 21st annual exhibition of contemporary artists. He submitted a painting titled “Store Front Christ.” The next year, he had a solo exhibit at the Roko Gallery in New York. It would be the first of three shows over the ensuing years.Williams’ early paintings depicted the life of Black people in the neighborhoods and in the jazz clubs around Brooklyn and Harlem where he grew up. The titles he chose represented the life he saw: “By The El (1955),” “Store Front Christ (1953),” “Poultry Market (1953), “Untitled (Seated Man with Bowed Head) (1951),” “Untitled (Cityscape) (1954),” “Untitled (Girl on a Fire Escape) (1954)” and “Quick Nap (1952),” (girl napping on a metal apartment railing).His use of color, his style and his subjects were influenced by Gregorio Prestopino, one of his teachers at the Brooklyn Museum school, and Williams used what he learned to illustrate the children in his colorful paintings of urban life.In 1955, he was awarded a John Hay Whitney Fellowship that he used to travel to Denmark. He chose the country because his mother's father was from the Danish West Indies, a former colony of Denmark, and had spoken to him about the country. He left for Denmark in 1956 and often visited its island of Bornholm where he saw landscapes for the first time, his second wife Marlena, a ceramicist and Danish citizen, noted.The trip changed the trajectory of his works, shifting the subjects from city streets to country fields with symbolic elements that denoted rebirth and freedom.