"Lengthening Shadows,"
1887. Oil on canvas from a private collection, on view at the
Bruce Museum.
At Home and on Retreat
GREENWICH AND WILTON, CONN. - In his lifetime, (1852-1919) was
considered one of America's leading painters, but for years after
his death his achievements were all but forgotten. In the last
several decades there has been a deserved resurgence of interest
in his oeuvre, reflected in major museum exhibitions and now, two
complementary shows of his art in Connecticut. Indeed, this
summer's Weir exhibitions suggest why his standing is likely to
improve for posterity - due to the quality of his art and the
fact that the Connecticut farm that inspired some of his best
work is preserved as a National Historic Site in the National
Park System.
The major art exhibition, "A Connecticut Place: Weir Farm, An
American Painter's Rural Retreat," featuring over 70 paintings,
as well as photographs and artifacts, is on view at The Bruce
Museum of Arts and Science in Greenwich through September 17.
Organized by the Weir Farm Trust and the National Park Service
and curated by Hildegard Cummings (retired curator of education
at the William Benton Museum of Art) and Harold Spencer
(professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut), it
showcases works by Weir and friends of his Branchville farm.
Designated a National Historic Site in 1990, Weir Farm is the
only national park in Connecticut and the only national park in
the country devoted to an American painter.
The fully illustrated catalogue accompanying the show contains
thoughtful essays by Cummings, Spencer, Nicolai Cikovsky (curator
of American and British paintings at the National Gallery of Art)
and Elizabeth Milroy (professor of art history at Wesleyan
University). Published by the Weir Farm Trust in collaboration
with the National Park Service, it is exceedingly well done.
The companion exhibition, ": An American Painter at His Home," is
on view just up the way at the Weir Farm National Historic Site
in Wilton, also through September 17. Displayed are some 20
watercolors, drawings, prints and archival items, offering
glimpses into the artist's activities at his rural retreat.
Together, these shows provide a unique opportunity for art lovers
to view both the art and the place that inspired it.
Weir's output was characterized by what collector Duncan Phillips
termed a "reticent idealism," while at the same time reflecting a
wide-ranging, inquiring mind. For a period in his career, he
adapted his own brand of Impressionism to depictions of his
Connecticut farm and its environs. Weir's still lifes, portraits,
figure studies and landscapes reflect an integrity and quiet,
individual vision that grew out of his family heritage.
Raised in a large, artistic household, he was the youngest son of
Robert W. Weir, longtime art instructor at the US Military
Academy at West Point. Like his older brother, John Ferguson
Weir, a painter who taught for years at Yale, Julian Alden Weir
was trained by his father before studying at the National Academy
of Design and in Paris. Weir traveled frequently to Europe,
soaking up a variety of artistic influences.
Handsome, well connected and with a gift for warm friendships, he
flourished in New York as a painter of academic still lifes and
portraits. Throughout his career, Weir exhibited widely and was
honored with medals and prizes. His work is represented in most
major American museums.
Weir was a founder of the Society of American Artists and The Ten
American Painters, president of the National Academy of Design
and the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, and
active in numerous other art organizations. He taught for years
at the Art Students League.
On his death in New York in 1919, he was saluted as a gifted
artist, able teacher, respected art-world leader and cherished
friend who advanced the cause of American art through works and
deeds. He was buried in Windham, Conn., the home of his two
wives, where he owned property.
In 1882, just as he was about to build a country retreat at Keene
Valley in the Adirondacks, the 30-year-old rising star was
offered a 153-acre farm in Branchville (straddling the
Ridgefield-Wilton line), Conn. in exchange for a painting he
owned. "Home is the starting place," said Weir, and for four
decades he made this "quiet little house among the rocks" his
main summer home. In 1883 he married Anna Baker of Windham, who
bore him several children.
Over time, Weir enlarged the Branchville farmhouse, built a
studio, created a fishing pond and acquired more land, for a
total of 238 acres. The ways in which Weir Farm became a major
source of artistic inspiration for the owner and visiting artists
in the subject of these fine exhibitions.
When he first visited the Connecticut farm that collector Erwin
Davis had unexpectedly offered him a few days before, Weir was
undaunted by the small farmhouse and rocky landscape. He was
immediately taken with the pastoral setting, which he recorded in
a bright, atmosphere watercolor, "Spring Landscape, Branchville"
(1882). This tiny image, in which a man-made stone wall blends
with trees framing a grassy landscape, "depicts the kind of
intimate landscape that would interest Weir for the next decades
and for which he became famous," observes Cummings.
The spot where "Spring Landscape" was executed is included in a
fascinating brochure available at Weir Farm that details a
self-guided walking tour to a dozen sites around the property
where significant artworks were produced. Following the "trail,"
one can compare contemporary landscapes with those depicted by
Weir, Childe Hassam and Alfred Pinkham Ryder; the principal
change is the growth of trees on formerly clear land.
Before long, Weir abandoned his Adirondacks project to focus on
developing the old farm in Connecticut. A place to escape the
pressures of New York, he farmed, fished, hunted and nurtured his
family there, but it was eventually the artistic opportunities it
provided that particularly captured his fancy.
The sign over the front door of Weir's farmhouse, inscribed by
his friend, celebrity architect Stanford White, was prophetic:
"Here shall we rest and call content our home." In his first few
years in residence Weir created several dark-toned domestic
scenes of his first wife Anna and their daughters in informal
poses around the house. His affection for his dogs animated a
rare but highly accomplished watercolor, "Three Dogs Before the
Fire" (1887).
For a time after the death of his first wife in childbirth, in
1892, the grief-stricken artist generated few easel paintings.
After marrying Anna's sister Ella Baker, in 1893, however, he
began to work again. "Baby Cora" (1894) shows Ella holding the
baby whose birth cost Anna her life. A far happier mood permeates
one of the most beautiful Impressionist works in the exhibition,
"In the Dooryard" (circa 1893-94), showing Ella, Weir's three
daughters and a lamb in their sun-dappled front yard in
Branchville.
Having already established his reputation when he acquired the
farm, Weir expected that still lifes and portraits would continue
to be his bread and butter. Indeed, he did not become a committed
landscape painter until the late 1880s, after which he created
some of the most subtly harmonious and evocative views of rural
New England in our art history. Employing soft blues, greens,
silvery grays and pale yellows, he evolved his own kind of
Impressionism, which incorporated touches from Japan, John H.
Twachtman, James McNeill Whistler and Symbolism. His work
reflected an inveterate experimenter always looking for better
means to express his personal response to nature.
While other artists also depicted their families at their country
houses and gardens, once he embraced landscape work, Weir went
further afield, ranging over his expanding property to paint
pond, pasture and woodland. These tranquil images, with humans
rarely in sight, are intimate, quiet and romantic. Recalling the
attractions of the old New England countryside, they were
comfortingly familiar to Weir's contemporaries.
The Bruce Museum exhibition is filled with sunny, brightly hued
landscapes that, to turn-of-the-century Americans, on the cusp of
becoming world leaders, yet beset by overcrowded cities and other
problems, found soothing, welcome - and admirable.
Running counter to the American landscape traditions of the
Hudson River School and its successors, that celebrated the
vastness, grandiosity and unspoiled beauty of the US, by the late
1880s, Weir was creating at his farm more intimate, subtle,
idiosyncratic canvases. "He aimed...," says Cummings, "at
capturing color, light, and pattern in ways that communicate the
essence of the Connecticut countryside: intimate rather than
panoramic, simple rather than monumental, personal rather than
sublime."
In "Lengthening Shadows" (1887) Weir immortalized the gentle
interplay of sunlight and shadow on a dirt road curving up a
tree-dotted, verdant hillside that he felt reflected the harmony
and tranquility of his little corner of the world.
Straightforward and unidealized, yet utilizing a subtly abstract
design and soft colors, he captured the essentials of this slide
of the natural world around him. "My eyes," he declared, "have
been opened to a big truth."
"The Farmer's Lawn," circa 1890. Oil on canvas, Mr and Mrs C.R.
Welling, on view at the Bruce Museum.
One of his loveliest early paintings is the hazy, pastel-like
view of blue-green bushes, a golden grain field and a red barn,
"The Farmer's Lawn" (circa 1888-90). As Cummings notes, it
"expresses...stability, harmony, and clam, but in a manner closer
to the sketchiness and coloring that are associated with
Impressionism and Japanese design."
Trees, which Weir called "nature's sentinels," figure prominently
in many of his Branchville paintings, and star in such evocative
canvases as "Connecticut Birches" (circa 1898), "Overhanging
Trees" (circa 1909), and "White Oaks" (1913).
In a variety of ways, Weir depicted aspects of nature that were
quite different from the normal fare of his fellow painters. "I
do not care much for subjects that other people like," he wrote.
Thus, he picked out a brush pile, toppled trees, old fences,
ravines or wild flowers rather than conventional lush gardens
that other artists favored.
One of the more intriguing works in the exhibition is
"Landscapes: Branchville, The Palace Car" (early 1890s), a sunny,
freely brushed depiction of the heated, portable wooden studio
Weir used for painting in winter. It is perched in a swale across
the road from the farmhouse and barn, a view that is included in
the walking tour of painting sites. This is one of several works
on view lent by the Museum of Art at Brigham Young University.
Weir's farm scenes range from an early tonalist image of a woman
in a chicken yard flanked by chickens, livestock and an upland
meadow, in "Connecticut Farm" (1886) to a vigorously brushed
image of chickens in front of the barn in "Midday" (1891) to a
vignette of a white horse standing outside the barn in "New
England Barnyard" (1904).
Perhaps his most enigmatic farmscape is the large (48-½ by 33-¾
inches) painting, "Ploughing for Buckwheat" (1898, retouched
circa 1912). Here, Weir offered an unusual, brightly colored view
of a stalwart farmer pausing behind his team of sturdy oxen to
gaze at a nearby child playing with some stones. "The painting
weaves together in a bucolic ensemble the juxtapositions of age
and gender, work and play, action and reverie, oxen and human
presence, tilled land and woods - a full range of experience of
the land," observes Spencer.
Art leader, warm friend and gracious host, Weir attracted
numerous painters to the farm. As Weslyan University art
historian Milroy notes in her catalogue essay, Weir "generously
shared his retreat with selected colleagues as well as family.
Fellow artists could spend the day working at their easels,
taking regular breaks to explore the wooded areas, or fish in
nearby lakes (and the fish pond after that was built)."
Hassam, Ryder, Twachtman and his brother John, the first three
among the most prominent artists of their day, were regular
visitors to Branchville. Other artists who came to the farm
included Emil Carlsen, Theodore Robinson, John Singer Sargent and
Edmund Tarbell. Western artist Frederic Remington, who built a
grand stone house that still stands in Ridgefield, stopped by for
visits that "seem to have been boisterous interruptions rather
than the sedate visits made by Weir's more intimate friends,"
according to Milroy.
Landscape master Twachtman (1849-1902), Weir's closest friend and
fellow organizer of The Ten American Painters, was stimulated to
acquire the Greenwich farm that inspired some of his best work as
a result of visits to the Branchville property. Twachtman
observed that Weir's farm was "Not splendid for the cultivation
of things to eat but finer for the production of things to look
at."
In Branchville the two comrades influenced each other's work
while exchanging ideas about artistic styles and organized an
exhibition held in New York in 1889. Twachtman's paintings of the
surroundings reflect the serenity of the site, while the hushed
silence of Weir's Woods in Snow" (circa 1895) and "Winter
Landscape" (1897) are reminiscent of Twachtman's celebrated
Greenwich snowscapes.
The two worked together on etchings, such as Twachtman's spare
but accomplished "Branchville, Connecticut" (circa 1888) and
Weir's sketchy, asymmetrical "The Land of Nodd" (circa 1888). In
these rather experimental efforts, Weir's "etching communicates
an excitement that contrasts with the peaceful feeling in the
Twachtman," comments Cummings in the catalogue.
Although usually called an American Impressionist, Cikovsky
argues in his brief essay that style constituted only part of
Weir's artistic makeup. He notes that although Weir had labeled
an 1877 Impressionist exhibition in Paris "worse than a Chamber
of Horrors," by 1891 he found in the style "a truth that I never
felt before," as he wrote his brother.
Weir's artistic heroes included English Grand Manner portraitist
Sir Joshua Reynolds, French academic painter Jules Bastien-Lepage
and French Barbizon artist Jean-Francois Millet. He was close to
American visionary painter Ryder, admired Whistler's delicate
nocturnes, and subtle Impressionist Twachtman was his best
friend. As the current exhibition suggest, Weir's personalized
approach to Impressionism, centered in the 1890s, incorporated
elements from many of these sources.
Cikovsky calls Weir one of our best Nineteenth Century figure
painters, "in the same class as William Merritt Chase;" among our
best still life painters, on a par with John La Farge, and notes
his skillful watercolors and distinguished work as a printmaker.
Above all, throughout his career, Weir was a self-described
"dreamer" and tireless seeker of new ideas, styles and approaches
to making art. As he said in 1913, "Really, I do not know what I
am best at. I believe I am a fisherman, dreamer and love of
nature and ... if I lived to 102 I might become an artist."
Because his work was all over the lot, it may be easiest to
classify him as an Impressionist. "But surely his greatest, most
appealing, and most significant virtue," writes Cikovsky, "is his
perpetually youthful curiosity, his restless discontent, his
willingness to always do something new or even try something old
if he had not done it before. He may have paid a price for his
variability, during his life and after his death, but he had no
choice and could not be otherwise."
The interesting companion exhibition at Weir Farm National
Historic Site highlights the artist's qualities as father and
friend to painting colleagues, as well as imaginative interpreter
of the farm and its landscape. Photographs and Weir's fishing
gear document his keen interest in that sport, while watercolors,
drawings and etchings depict everything from buildings and the
land around the farm to members of his family. An oil painting,
"Weir Family at the Table" (early 1890s) shows the artist, his
wife and three children, along with his brother John and his
wife, seated in the Branchville dining room.
Other highlights are etchings of a young girl (one of his
daughters?) reading a book, "The Picture Book" and "Branchville,"
an expansive view of farm landscape.
Sketchbooks with drawings by Weir's young daughter Dorothy
demonstrate her considerable early skills and offer insights into
life at Weir Farm through a child's eyes. In 1931 Dorothy
(1890-1931) married prominent sculptor Mahonri Mackintosh Young
(1877-1957), who built a studio adjacent to his father-in-law's.
Both barn-red structures are open nowadays for tours. It was here
that Young carried out such important commissions as the enormous
"This is the Place Monument" in Salt Lake City and the portrait
of his grandfather, "Brigham Young," for the US Capitol.
As Cummings points out, "A retreat in Weir's own time from the
stresses of the day, ... (Weir Farm) remains remarkably unchanged
in ours, both in appearance and in its ability to provide a
memorable and refreshing experience." Preservation of the farm
was aided by the Weir family and interested groups that fended
off developers and finally had the site added to the National
Park System ten years ago. Since 1958 artists Doris and Sperry
Andrews have lived in the farmhouse, which will eventually become
part of Weir Farm National Historic Site. Today, artists of all
ages seek out the farm on their own or to participate in art
classes or artists-in-residence programs.
According to Constance Evans, executive director of the Weir Farm
Trust, which provides admirable support as the Park Service's
primary private partner on behalf of the farm, 60 of the 238
acres that Weir acquired between 1882 and 1907 are now owned by
the government.
As Roy Cortez, the National Park Superintendent at Weir Farm
points out, "Rarely does one have the ability to view works of
art and to experience the place that inspired the artist to
create them. Weir Farm is special in that visiting the site, to
walk the paths and admire the historic structures, make viewing
the artwork all the more meaningful. You can understand how Weir
and other artists found inspiration in this place."
As these two welcome exhibitions underscore, 's spirit still
speaks to us through his art and the landscape of his beloved
farm. Even if you miss the shows, do visit Weir Farm, which is
destined to provide historical insights, artistic inspiration and
balm for the soul in perpetuity, under the watchful eyes of the
National Park Service.
The Bruce Museum of Arts and Science is at One Museum Drive in
Greenwich. For information, 203/869-0963. Weir Farm National
Historic Site is at 735 Nod Hill Road in Wilton. For information,
203/834-1896.
