Walsh was an artist and teacher who had trained under William Matthew Hodgkins. He never travelled abroad but instead confined himself to capturing the peculiarities of the local landscape. Walsh ignored any distinction between a sketch and a studio painting, drawing directly with wet blobs of paint in the open air.

Working "en plein air" (a French expression, coined by the Impressionist painters who worked outside directly from nature) Walsh blurs the traditional line between a preliminary sketch and a finished studio-produced painting.

Often lacking titles, his paintings were quickly produced in response to the natural arrangement of motifs which appealed to his aesthetic sensibility.

A friend, John Cam Duncan, writes of how he watched Walsh paint energetically "over the paper, with its chaotic mass of flowing colour - he was a wet worker, his brushes guided by instinct, genius - I knew not what - darted here and there designing, taking out, putting in all those telling blobs of colour which went toward the making of one of his exquisite landscapes".

A draughtsman in the Public Works Department, Walsh took painting lessons from David Con Hutton at the Otago School of Art, and also from the topographical landscapist George O'Brien in 1883. In 1886 he was appointed to the staff of the newly founded Canterbury School of Art, and taught there for 24 years. After marriage he moved to Auckland, and died in Tauranga.

- Lara Strongman, Curator of Fine Arts