Richard Guy Walton Papers

Born in 1914, Richard Guy Walton arrived in Reno in 1929, accompanying his mother who was seeking a divorce. Eventually, he settled in Virginia City where he resided in semi-seclusion for thirty years of his long and many-faceted career. On the advice of the noted painter/cartoonist James Swinnerton, Walton studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles and, in 1936, he returned to Nevada to join the Federal Arts Project, the Depression-era program for unemployed artists. Walton’s mural for the Buhl, Idaho post office was his major public work during this period.

Walton was a prolific painter and photographer. The subjects for his paintings reflected his eclectic concerns: the stark Nevada desert, Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, the Vegas Strip, ineffectual politicians, and studies of spatial issues that usually intrigue mathematicians and physicists. Walton biographer James Hulse wrote, “Nevada provided much scope for his restless spirit.” During the 1990s, Walton was honored with retrospective shows at the Sierra Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, where he died in 2005.

[Information taken from the digital exhibit "Post War Bohemians in Northern Nevada," http://knowledgecenter.unr.edu/digital_collections/exhibits/bohemians/, accessed December 6, 2018]