LOT Phillips de Pury & Company  /  AMERICAN ART  / 

53

Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection JULIAN ALDEN WEIR (1852-1919) Silver Chalic...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:60,000.00 - 80,000.00 USD
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection JULIAN ALDEN WEIR (1852-1919) Silver Chalic...
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
JULIAN ALDEN WEIR
(1852-1919)
Silver Chalice with Roses, 1882
signed, dated and inscribed on chalice, "To Anna Dwight Baker from J. Alden Weir/ May 18th/1882/N.Y."
oil on canvas
12 x 9 in. (30.5 x 22.9 cm) <p>Estimate: $60,000-80,000 <p>Provenance
Anna Baker (Mrs. J. Alden Weir) Mahonri M. Young (son-in-law of the artist) Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah Private Collection, New York Andrew Crispo Gallery, New York, 1980 Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano, Switzerland, 1980 <p> Exhibited
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Denver, The Denver Art Museum, J. Alden Weir: An American Impressionist, 1983-1984 <p> Literature
J.B. Millet, ed., Julian Alden Weir: An Appreciation of His Life and Works, New York, 1921, p. 128 Dorothy Weir Young, The Life and Letters of J. Alden Weir, New Haven, 1960, p. 155 (letter dated New York, May 13, 1882) Doreen Bolger Burke, J. Alden Weir: An American Impressionist, Newark, 1983, p. 136-137 (illustrated as Silver Cup with Roses) Barbara Novak, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: Nineteenth-Century American Painting, London, 1986, p. 290, no. 101 (illustrated, p. 291) <p> The career of Julian Alden Weir is one of the more contradictory in American art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The son of Robert Weir, a well-known painter and teacher at West Point for forty years, and brother of John Ferguson Weir, Chairman of the Art Department at Yale University and also a professional painter of note, Julian Weir studied in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with great French academician Jean Léon Gérôme, after initial instruction at the National Academy of Design in New York. It was in 1877, during the third Impressionist exhibition in Paris, that he wrote in a letter to his parents his memorable diatribe against the new movement: "I went across the river the other day to see an exhibition of the work of a new school which call themselves 'Impressionalists.' I never in my life saw more horrible things...They do not observe drawing nor form but give you an impression of what they call nature. It was worse than the Chamber of Horrors."1 The irony here, of course, lies in the fact that within little more than a decade, Weir would himself begin to adopt Impressionist strategies, and become one of the leaders of the American Impressionist movement and a founding member of "The Ten American Painters." <p>Even in France, however, Weir was not impervious to more advanced aesthetic strategies and developed a strong friendship with Jules Bastien Lepage, the leader of the French Naturalist movement. Weir returned to the United States in 1877 and settled in New York City, where he became a founding member of the younger painters trained primarily in Munich and Paris who broke away from the more traditional National Academy of Design. Weir devoted his art primarily to portraiture, figure painting, and still lifes, as well as developing a closely knit family after marrying Anna Dwight Baker in 1883 and acquiring a summer home in Branchville in Western Connecticut, where he created many of his outdoor scenes, as well as at the Baker homestead in Eastern Connecticut in Windham. <p>Weir's still lifes of the 1880s are considered among the finest paintings of his long career, some critics finding them even superior to his more contemporary Impressionist pictures that he began painting at the end of the decade. Influenced by the poetic interpretation of floral arrangements introduced in the 1860s by John La Farge, which replaced the prevailing botanical accuracy favored at mid-century, Weir's 1880s still lifes are probably the finest produced in the United States during this decade. Like many still-life painters of the period, he favored roses, vigorously painted, yet emphasizing their frugality as the bouquets offer a transition from bud to full bloom to dying flowers, and single fallen petals on the supporting tabletops. The flowers are brightly colored, yellow, white, or pink flowers, generally silhouetted against a dark background. In many of these, the natural beauty of the flowers is combined and complemented with human craftsmanship, often of past eras, such as the seventeenth century silver chalice introduced in the present work. Such a combination provides a multitude of contrasts - darkness and lightness, longevity vs. painterly expression - and yet all united as two configurations of extreme beauty. The silver chalice was one of Weir's favorite "props" among the man-made objects he introduced into his series of still lifes of the period - it appears again in the 1882 Flower Piece in the Portland. Oregon, Art Museum and among a mass of beautiful flowers encircling his sister, Carrie, in his exquisite figure piece, Flora, 1882 (Provo, Utah, Brigham Young University Art Museum) - but he utilized glass and ceramic objects as well. <p>The present work contains personal implications as well, for it was painted in New York as a present for his fiancée, Anna Baker, on May 18, 1882; Anna was in Windham at the time. A mix-up in the size of the frame he had made for the painting led Weir to create a second, almost identical version on panel (Still Life Roses, Canajohaire Library and Art Gallery, Canajoharie, New York), somewhat more sketchily painted, and with the vase of flowers moved from the right to the left side.2 After a visit to Windham, Weir returned to New York and on May 25, sent his birthday gift to his future wife; "To Anna Dwight Baker from J. Alden Weir" is inscribed on the rim of the chalice, while "May 18th/1882 N.Y" is on the body of the vessel.3 Nevertheless, the similarity of the two paintings has subsequently led to referential confusion.4 <p>We are grateful to Dr. William Gerdts for cataloguing this lot. <p> Notes 1 Letter from Weir in Paris to his parents, April 15, 1877, quoted in: Dorothy Weir Young, The Life & Letters of J. Alden Weir. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1869, p. 123. 2 This is discussed in detail by Kenneth W. Maddox in: Barbara Novak, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: Nineteenth-Century American Painting, London, Philip Wilson Publishers, 1986, pp. 290-292. 3 Doreen Bolger Burke, J. Alden Weir An American Impressionist, University of Delaware Press; New York, London, and Toronto, Cornwall Books, 1983. 4 See, for instance, Maddox, op. cit., p. 290, where the Canajoharie picture is listed among the literature concerning Silver Chalice with Roses in J.B. Millet, editor, Julian Alden Weir: An Appreciation of His Life and Works, New York, 1921, p. 128.
Sign In to Bookmark Lot