Lot 8
Irene Weir
New York / Connecticut / Missouri., (1858 - 1944)
untitled landscape
oil on board
signed lower right.
From the Archives of askART: She was the first "Directress" of the Norwich Art School. She studied with J.H. Twachtman and her uncles J. Alden Weir and John Ferguson Weir as well as with her grandfather, Robert Walter Weir. The Slater Memorial Museum and Norwich Art School are intimately linked. Had it not been for the Museum, the art school may never have come into existence. Indeed, it was the resource of the collection of plaster cast copies of the ancient World's great sculpture that inspired the Trustees of the Norwich Free Academy to establish a professional training institution for artists. After the dedication of the Slater's Cast Collection in 1888, NFA established the Norwich Art School to widen the opportunities to profit by the new facility. Third NFA Head of School, Robert Porter Keep remarked at the opening of the Art School that The Art School is designed to promote the general advantage of the community. It offers thorough training to residents of Norwich and others and seeks to promote the application of Art to Industry, and with this latter view, the departments of Design and Modelling in clay have been established and a class in Draughting has been organized. The Art School was supported by William A. Slater and other benefactors. Slater clearly saw the deep connection between his greatest gift to the Academy and the Art School, where the principal method of pedagogy was "Drawing from the Antique", the term used for the process of using the casts as subject matter for "life drawing."
Robert Walter Weir (June 18, 1803 - May 1, 1889) was best known as an educator and historical painter. Considered an artist of the Hudson River School, he was elected to the National Academy of Design 1829. Weir served as an instructor at the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York. John Ferguson Weir (1841-1926) was a painter and sculptor, became a Member of the National Academy of Design in 1866, and was the first director of the School of Fine Arts at Yale University (1869-1913). Julian Alden Weir (1852-1919), studied under his father and at the École des Beaux Arts and under Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris. He became a distinguished portrait, figure and landscape painter and was one of the founders of the Society of American Artists 1877. J. Alden Weir was a member of the Cos Cob Art Colony near Greenwich, Connecticut and one of "The Ten," a loosely-allied group of American artists dissatisfied with professional art organizations, who banded together in 1898 to exhibit their works as a stylistically-unified group. Julian Weir became a member of the National Academy of Design in 1886.
Irene Weir assumed the role of director of the Norwich Art School in 1890 apparently before she had completed her own training. According to an un-attributed obituary, she received her bachelor of fine arts degree from Yale University in 1906 and from 1923 to 1927 was a student at the École des Beaux Arts Americaine at Fountainbleau. Also early in her career, she wrote The Greek Painters' Art, which in addition to interpreting the original figures from which many of the casts in the Slater's collection were taken, is a "Grand Tour" style travelogue memoir typical of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Irene Weir established the School of Design and Liberal Arts in New York City in 1917. Her direction of the school appears to have overlapped her studies in Paris. She painted a portrait of Madame Marie Curie for New York's Memorial Hospital and for the new chapel of the West Side Prison, she painted a mural entitled Mother and Babe with Jesus in 1942 at the age of 80.
Vivian F. Zoe, Director
Slater Memorial Museum
- Dimensions: 23 1/2"H x 17 1/2"W (sight), 29 5/8"H x 23 1/2"W (frame)
- Medium: oil on board
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