Landscape
Artist
Julian Alden Weir
(American, 1852 - 1919)
Date1894
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions24 5/8 x 34 in. (62.6 x 86.4 cm)
ClassificationsOil Painting
Credit LineHarriet Russell Stanley Fund
Terms
Object number1945.25
DescriptionThis pastoral landscape reveals Weir at his most Impressionistic. The dominance of the blue-green range exemplifies the Tonalist component of much of American Impressionism. The influence of Japanese prints is revealed in several elements: the empty foreground; the interest in pattern, notably the play of shadows across the meadow; and the flattened forms, especially the rock outcropping in the lower right. Weir’s broken brushstroke is evident on the rock, where parallel strokes of blue, green, and violet activate the soft tan background. The painting appears at first glance to be a serene view of domesticated nature, but a red-orange accent in the center background compels the viewer’s eye to a factory chimney. Its vertical form links it both to the trees and to the pole protruding from a haystack in the upper right--to both nature and agriculture.
Between 1893 and 1897 Weir painted several views of the textile factories in Willimantic, Connecticut.(1) While it is not certain that the New Britain oil depicts that particular mill town, it demonstrates the idealization of the New England factory village that is characteristic of his Willimantic paintings. In “Landscape”, more than in any factory picture, Weir softened the industrial reality by keeping it at a distance and linking it formally with the countryside. At a time when Americans worried that the price of industrial progress might be the loss of natural beauty and agrarian values, Weir painted visual reassurances that America could reconcile tradition and change.
SGL
Bibliography:
Dorothy Weir Young, “The Life and Letters of J. Alden Weir” (New York: Kennedy Graphics, 1971); Janet A. Flint, “J. Alden Weir, an American Printmaker”, 1852-1919, exhib. cat. (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1972); Doreen Bolger Burke, “J. Alden Weir: An American Impressionist” (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1983); Hildegard Cummings, Helen K. Fusscas, and Susan G. Larkin, “J. Alden Weir: A Place of His Own”, exhib. cat. (Storrs, Conn.: William Benton Museum of Art, 1991). Notes:
On View
Not on view
