Walter Greaves was a British painter, etcher and topographical draftsman.
Greaves was born at 31 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, to Charles William Greaves, a Chelsea boat-builder and waterman, and his wife, Elizabeth née Greenway. Charles had been J. M. W. Turner's boatman and, through that connection, Greaves and one of his brothers, Henry (1844–1904), met James McNeill Whistler in 1863. The pair introduced him to the sights of the River Thames before becoming his studio assistants, pupils and close friends for over 20 years. The American painter used the experiences of his Thames expeditions as inspiration when painting his later ‘nocturne’ views of the river at night. "He taught us to paint", Walter Greaves said, "and we taught him the waterman's jerk", the brothers having initially trained as shipwrights and boatmen.
One of the most widely-known of Greaves' paintings is 'Hammersmith Bridge on Boat-Race Day', a naïve masterpiece which he claimed to have painted when he was aged sixteen in 1862; however, since he was unreliable over dates, its history has never been settled. The Greaves brothers accompanied Whistler to life classes and Walter Greaves tried portraiture, some of his most successful works being of their neighbour Thomas Carlyle, whom Whistler also painted. Greaves also drew and painted Whistler, sometimes in caricature, in Chelsea settings and his characteristic moods. In 1876, the Greaves brothers helped Whistler decorate The Peacock Room (now in the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), for the shipowner Frederick Leyland.
In the late 1870s, Whistler began to gather a sophisticated group of friends about himself, including Walter Sickert and Mortimer Menpes. Excluded from this new distinguished circle, Greaves suffered years of neglect, misfortune and poverty before a re-discovery by William Marchant, proprietor of the Goupil Galleries, who exhibited Greaves's work in his London gallery in 1911.
Greaves's new-found glory was short-lived, however: three weeks after the exhibition opened, Whistler's self-appointed biographers, Joseph and Elizabeth Pennell, damaged Greaves's reputation by claiming that he had plagiarized Whistler's work. In May 1911, Greaves sold eight letters from Whistler to his father and himself at auction. Another exhibition of his work was held in 1922 at the Grosvenor Gallery arranged by Augustus John, William Nicholson and William Rothenstein. He was elected an honorary member of the Chelsea Arts Club.
Despite the support of a few fellow painters, including Sickert, Greaves again fell into obscurity and spent his last eight years as a Poor Brother of the London Charterhouse.
Greaves died, unmarried, of pneumonia in the West London Hospital, Hammersmith, on 23 November 1930. He was buried in the Charterhouse graveyard at Little Hallingbury in Essex. His former home at 104 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, where he lived from 1855 to 1897, is near to the Whistler statue and has a commemorative blue plaque.
The Tate holds some examples of his work, including two self-portraits and an image of Battersea Reach that is currently on display.
