Walter Ernest Webster RI ROI RP (Manchester, 1877 – London, 30 April 1959) was a British figure and portrait painter who also worked as an illustrator. He won a scholarship to the National Art Training Schools, later the Royal College of Art, and attended the Royal Academy Schools from 1899 to 1904, taking prizes for life drawing and for a draped figure. He exhibited at the Royal Academy almost every year from his student days until his death — forty-three works there, and larger numbers at the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours and the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, of which he was elected a member in 1920. He joined the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in 1921 and became its vice-president in 1937. At the Paris Salon he took a bronze medal in 1912, silver in 1913 and 1914, and a gold medal in 1931 — the year of this cover. He began working for magazines while still a student and produced cover illustrations for publications including Ladies' Home Journal and The Etude. His specialism was portraits of young women in a soft, fluid manner; his obituary in The Times recorded the influence of Boucher and Chardin and an eighteenth-century flavour in much of his work. He married the illustrator Susan Beatrice Pearse in 1919 and lived in Fulham until his death. Webster is held in British public collections including the Walker Art Gallery, Gallery Oldham, Paisley Museum and Art Galleries, the McLean Museum and Art Gallery, the Wellcome Collection and the Government Art Collection, the last of which holds his portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. He appears in Bénézit, in Johnson and Greutzner's Dictionary of British Artists 1880–1940, and in Who Was Who. Sources give his birth year variously as 1877 and 1878; the 1939 Register and his baptismal record support 1877, while the Royal Academy's own record gives 1878.
Nationality: British
Active period: 1900–1959