Julian Alden Weir
American, 1852 - 1919
Death-PlaceNew York, NY
Birth-PlaceWest Point, NY
BiographyJulian Alden Weir (1852-1919)Julian Alden Weir grew up in the studio. His father, Robert W. Weir, was a painter and drawing instructor at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. His half-brother John Ferguson Weir was also a painter and, from 1869 to 1913, the director of the Yale School of Fine Arts. Julian received his earliest training from his father and his brother and, like them, became an important teacher and a leader of the cultural associations of his time.
Weir studied at the National Academy of Design from 1870 to 1872. His godfather’s widow, Mrs. Bradford R. Alden, subsidized his European training; in gratitude, he adopted J. Alden Weir as his professional name. He studied in Paris from 1873 to 1877, primarily under Jean-Léon Gérôme at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and spent holidays sketching in the French countryside with an international group of young artists, adopting a more natural and naive approach that would conflict with his strict academic training throughout his career.
Weir returned to America in 1877 and settled in New York, which remain his professional base and winter home for the rest of his life. He acquired a country home in Branchville, Connecticut, in 1882; today, that property, called Weir Farm, is the only United States national park dedicated to a painter. After his marriage to Anna Dwight Baker in 1883, Weir spent time at his inlaws’ farm in Windham, Connecticut. As he painted in the open air in Branchville and Windham, Weir’s landscapes became lighter in color and looser in brushwork beginning in the late 1880s. His emerging Impressionism was influenced by his friends John Henry Twachtman and Theodore Robinson and the study of Japanese prints. However, Weir’s conversion to Impressionism was incomplete. Even after his landscapes became lighter, he continued to produce the dark fluid still lifes that remain among his most appealing works.
Weir taught for about two decades at the Cooper Union and the Art Students League in New York City. With Twachtman, he conducted a summer school in Cos Cob, Connecticut, in 1892 and 1893; he offered instruction in Branchville during the summers of 1897 to 1901. Weir was a member of the Tile Club, the Society of American Artists, and the Ten. He also served as president of the National Academy of Design and as president and trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Landscape, 1894
Oil on canvas, 24 5/8 x 34 in. (65.1 x 86.4 cm)
Signed and dated (lower right): J. Alden Weir -94
Harriet Russell Stanley Fund (1945.25)
This 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:
Person Type(not assigned)
