Henry Walton made elaborate, highly detailed oil and watercolor portraits and miniatures as well as views of towns and buildings, in the literal, rather stiff style of American provincial artists of the first half of the nineteenth century. Like many such artists, Walton is a relatively obscure figure. He was born in Ballston, New York, the son of Judge Henry Walton, one of the founders of Saratoga Springs, New York, a highly popular mineral springs resort in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The younger Walton was raised in New York City and in Albany, New York, received an elite education, and may have been sent to England, as his father had been, for further study. His precise renderings of buildings suggest he was trained in architectural draftsmanship. His earliest surviving works are book illustrations dating to the 1820s, during which time Walton apparently established himself as an in-demand designer of lithographs (a kind of popular reproductive print) of landscapes and town views published by the New York and Boston firm of John and William Pendleton.

Around 1830, Walton followed the stream of enterprising pioneers keen to settle the Michigan Territory in the years before statehood. Six years later, he established himself in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York as a popular painter of town views, full-size portraits in oils and in watercolors, and miniature portraits. For the next decade-and-a-half, Walton circulated between Michigan and New York. In the late 1840s, he shifted to the counties southwest of Ithaca, New York, and across the border into Pennsylvania. He appears to have been without artistic rivals, but in 1851 the restless Walton left for California with a party joining the rush for newly discovered gold. Only two works Walton made in California have survived, and they also are the last he is known to have made. In 1857 Walton returned to Michigan, where he married, became a substantial landowner, and held several local government positions. Walton died in Michigan, his earlier career as an artist evidently forgotten. Almost a century passed before mid-twentieth-century collectors, newly fascinated by so-called American folk art, began to assemble and appreciate surviving examples of Walton's artistry.