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American Impressionism

Six Autumn Paintings of New England (And How They Look Today)

New England’s fall foliage inspires so much imagery we were pretty sure we could find six autumn paintings of New England. Then we thought we could identify each location and find a current photo, with help from Google Maps, Wikipedia and our own archives.

Sure enough, we found a painting of an identifiable scene in each New England state – all beautiful, of course, and all of autumn. We even found photos of the subjects of some of the six autumn paintings from the artist’s vantage point.

Here then are six autumn paintings of New England, one for each state.

Old Lyme, Connecticut

Reflections of Old Lyme by Guy Wiggins

We naturally turned to the village of Old Lyme in New London to find an autumn landscape painting.

Old Lyme was the site of an artist colony, arguably the largest and most important in the United States for 20 years from about 1900. It started when Florence Griswold and her sister Adele fell on hard times, as had New London. The Griswold sisters began to rent rooms to boarders in their family’s old Georgian home. When New York artists learned about the picturesque seaside town, they flocked to Miss Florence’s art colony.

Guy Wiggins, who painted Reflections of Old Lyme, was one of the youngest members of the Old Lyme art colony. He painted with his father, Carleton Wiggins, also a landscape artist. Guy Wiggins was better known for his paintings of New York skyscrapers in winter.

The painting was in the archives of the Caldwell Gallery in Hudson, N.Y.

Today, the Old Lyme Art Colony lives on as the Florence Griswold Museum (open from May through October), and Old Lyme has regained its prosperity.

Old Lyme today, courtesy Google Maps.

Mount Katahdin

Mount Katahdin by Marsden Hartley

Marsden Hartley, born in 1877 in Lewiston, Maine, was a renowned Modernist artist who painted manly, rugged scenes of fishermen, mountains and rocky seashores. He often painted Mount Katahdin, Maine’s highest mountain in Baxter State Park.

He moved to New York to embrace Greenwich Village Bohemianism, then in 1901 began a pattern he would repeat throughout his life: He left New York for Maine for the first of many summers. Hartley would forever bounce between the city and the country, tiring of one, then the other. In 1937, after a long stint in Europe, he returned to Lewiston, declaring he wanted to become ‘the painter of Maine.’

He made no money and almost abandoned art at the age of 29. Then he got a job as a handyman as a utopian community in Eliot, Maine, and continued to paint. He decided to continue as an artist after he put on a successful one-man show at the home of one of the community members.

Mount Katahdin

Marlborough Street, Boston

Frederick Childe Hassam, a New Englander through and through, painted many landscapes of the region throughout his life. Born in the Dorchester section of Boston in 1859, he was related to Nathaniel Hawthorne on his mother’s side.

Despite an uncle’s offer to send him to Harvard, Hassam dropped out of high school at 17 and got a job at Little, Brown & Co. He then worked as an engraver and an illustrator, until 1893 when he had his first solo exhibition of watercolors. The next year, his friend Celia Thaxter convinced him to stop calling himself ‘Fred’ and use his middle name instead. Hassam often painted the Isles of Shoals when he visited Thaxter at her salon there.

Starting in the mid-1890s, Hassam painted in Massachusetts in Gloucester and Provincetown, and at Connecticut art colonies in Cos Cob and Old Lyme.

He married Kathleen Maud Doane in 1882 and moved to Boston’s then-tony South End. Hassam began painting Boston cityscapes – an unorthodox choice at the time.

Later, Hassam painted cityscapes in Paris and New York. He died in 1935, and for years he was considered one of the abandoned geniuses of American Impressionism. He was rediscovered in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and his paintings sold for millions.

Marlborough Street in 2017

Mount Washington

Autumn in the Conway Meadows Looking Towards Mount Washington by Albert Bierstadt

More than 400 artists painted landscapes of the White Mountains of New Hampshire beginning at the turn of the 19th century. They wanted to promote the region and sell their paintings. It worked. Their dramatic images of a mountain wilderness attracted tourists from northeastern cities, especially in the summertime.

Albert Bierstadt was known for his paintings of the American West and considered a member of the Hudson River School. He was born in Germany in 1833, but his family moved to New Bedford in 1850. He studied art in Boston, and developed an interest in topography. It was natural for him to be drawn to Mount Washington, the tallest mountain on the East Coast.

Bierstadt studied painting in Germany for several years before returning to New Bedford. He painted Autumn in the Conway Meadows Looking Towards Mount Washington in 1858 just as he was getting noticed as an artist. The next year he headed west. There he was inspired to paint the large landscapes that gained him enormous popularity.

Mount Washington today. Not much has changed.

Sakonnet Point, R.I.

A Breezy Day: Sakonnet Point, Rhode Island, by Thomas Worthington Whittredge, courtesy Amon Carter Museum

The Great Hurricane of 1938 destroyed nearly all the buildings in the seaside village of Sakonnet Point in Little Compton, R.I.

Thomas Worthington Whittredge got there many years beforehand. Like his friend Albert Bierstadt, he was a member of the Hudson River School of Art. Like Bierstadt, he was famous for his paintings of the West.

Whittredge was born in 1820 in Ohio, and studied painting in Europe with Emmanuel Leutze. Leutze used Whittredge as a model for George Washington and his steersman in his iconic painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware.

Worthington Whittredge painted A Breezy Day–Sakonnet Point, Rhode Island, sometime around 1880. Four years later, Sakonnet Light was built. Preservationists made sure the historic lighthouse is still there.

Sakonnet Point. July 2012. Image courtesy Google Maps.

Bob Slater’s Hill, South Royalton, Vt.

Bob Slater’s Hill by Edward Hopper, courtesy Huntington Museum of Art

From the time he was 29 in 1912, Edward Hopper spent nearly every summer in New England until his death in 1967.

He is mostly associated with Cape Cod, Boston’s North Shore and New York City, but he spent some little-known time in and around South Royalton, Vt. He visited first in 1927 and then in the latter 1930s.

Hopper painted two dozen known works of Vermont, all watercolors and mostly ignored until rediscovered and assembled in an exhibit recently. Many of the scenes he painted then haven’t changed much.

Wagon Wheels Farm, July 2019. Image courtesy Google Maps.

There is actually a book and an entire blog devoted to Finding Edward Hopper in Vermont, both by Bonnie Tocher Clause. Of the painting Bob Slater’s Hill, she writes,

From the window of the upstairs guest room on Wagon Wheels Farm, Edward and Jo Hopper looked out over another South Royalton hill — Jigger Hill, or “Bob Slater’s Hill,” as Edward dubbed it. He recorded his fascination with the changing light and shadows in a watercolor, a striking study of contrasting views, near and far… In Bob Slater’s Hill and others of the Vermont watercolors, Hopper captured the particular shade of yellowish-green that’s a harbinger of fall in Vermont.

It isn’t clear to us which hill is “Bob Slater”s” or “Jigger” Hill. But today a historical marker stands in front of the old farm, with the message, “Tourists Accommodated 1937-1942.” It notes that the Hoppers stayed there, as well as Eleanor Roosevelt (not at the same time).

Image of Mount Katahdin By TJ aka Teej – Self-photographed, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1091663. This story was updated in 2021.

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Childe Hassam Paints What He Sees (And Oh, What He Saw)

Childe Hassam liked to paint without his shirt on, and sometimes beat his chest while at work. He was fun, energetic and self-assured, and when he started going to Florence Griswold’s house in Old Lyme, Conn., other artists followed.

Boston Common at Twilight by Childe Hassam, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Hassam called the Old Lyme artists colony ‘just the place for high thinking and low living.’ Archaelogists later found a stash of beer, wine and whiskey bottles beneath the ruins of his studio.

He had a dark complexion and heavy-lidded eyes, and many people mistook him for a Middle Easterner – a mistake he enjoyed promulgating. He took to painting an Islamic-looking moon next to his signature, which evolved into a slash.

Mount Vernon Street, by Childe Hassam.

Childe Hassam

Frederick Childe Hassam was born in the Dorchester section of Boston on Oct. 17, 1859. He was related to Nathaniel Hawthorne on his mother’s side.

As a boy, he once claimed, he could swim across Dorchester Bay and knock out any of the other boys with his fists. His father’s cutlery business was wiped out in the Great Boston Fire of 1872.

Despite an uncle’s offer to send him to Harvard, Hassam dropped out of high school at 17 and got a job at Little, Brown & Co. He later got worked as an engraver after studying wood engraving on the side.

Illustration for Scribner’s by Childe Hassam

In 1882 he became a freelance illustrator, while taking drawing classes at the Lowell Institute (a division of MIT) and at the Boston Art Club, He contributed illustrations to Harper’s and Scribner’s magazines.

Celia Thaxter’s Garden, by Childe Hassam. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 1893, he had his first solo exhibition of watercolors. The next year, his friend Celia Thaxter convinced him to stop calling himself ‘Fred’ and use his middle name instead. Childe Hassam visited Thaxter at her summer salon on Appledore Island in the Isles of Shoals off the coast of New Hampshire and Maine. He often painted on the islands and illustrated her book, An Island Garden.

Church at Old Lyme by Childe Hassam. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y.

Starting in the mid-1890s, Hassam painted in Gloucester, Mass., Provincetown, Cos Cob and at the Old Lyme Art Colony in Connecticut.

Historical Painter?

Unlike contemporary artists who painted historical subjects, Hassam and his circle painted what they saw. In an 1892 magazine interview, Hassam said,

Hitherto historical painting has been considered the highest branch of the art. A true historical painter, it seems to me, is one who paints the life he sees about him, and so makes a record of his own epoch.

A Rainy Day in Boston, by Childe Hassam.

He married Kathleen Maud Doane in 1882 and moved to Boston’s then-tony South End. He began painting Boston cityscapes – an unorthodox choice.

Couch on the Porch by Childe Hassam

They moved to Paris in 1886 so Hassam could study figure painting. He rented Auguste Renoir’s former studio, which was littered with his unsold paintings. Hassam realized Renoir’s experiments in pure color and realized it was what he was trying to do himself.

The Hassams returned to America in 1889, settling in New York City. There, Hassam became the ‘painter of the avenue,’ taking his easel to the streets near a succession of studios he rented on or near Fifth Avenue. He knew how to market his work, and painted the wealthy people likely to buy his paintings.

Summer Evening by Childe Hassam. Florence Griswold Museum.

Hassam resisted labels, including Impressionist, which he and his friends John Twachtman and J. Alden Weir helped bring to America.

The Ten

In 1897, Hassam, Weir and Twachtman formed a group of contemporary artists from Boston and New York. Known as ‘The Ten,’ they exhibited together. Between 1898 and 1919, Hassam exhibited in every one of the group’s annual shows. Over his lifetime, he produced more than 2,000 paintings and 400 prints.

By 1913, when modernism came to New York at the Armory Show, Childe Hassam was no longer an artistic rebel. He pooh-poohed surrealists and cubists, calling them ‘art boobies.’ He and Weir in turn were called ‘the mammoth and mastodon of art.’

The Fourth of July by Childe Hassam

An outburst of patriotism during World War I inspired Hassam’s memorable flag paintings.

One, Flags, Fifth Avenue, was a favorite of socialite Brooke Astor. Her estranged son sold it from under her to a private collector though she intended to will it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 1919, the Hassams moved to East Hampton on Long Island, where he continued to paint and to sell his paintings. Critics dismissed him, and he crankily responded by calling them dolts, asses and dullards.

Childe Hassam died on Aug. 27, 1935. For years he was considered one of the abandoned geniuses of American Impressionism. Collectors rediscovered him in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and his paintings sold for millions.

A critic named Elisabeth Luther Cary wrote, “Childe Hassam has gone and with him something irreplaceable has left American art. I know of no other painter with his power to make the world look convincingly joyous with its own joy, and this he seemed always able to do.”

If you enjoyed this story, you might like to read about another New England artist, Fidelia Bridges, here. This story was updated in 2022.

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John Henry Twachtman Paints the Connecticut Countryside

When John Henry Twachtman finished the painting of his home in Greenwich, Conn. (below), he was inspiring other American painters to adopt fresh, original elements of the French Impressionist style of painting.

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Artists Home in Autumn in Greenwich Connecticut by John Henry Twachtman

Cos Cob

He did much of his painting at the Cos Cob Art Colony, credited with helping to launch American Impressionism. Though Twachtman was a respected and influential leader at Cos Cob, he didn’t enjoy much commercial success during his career. He had to teach to eke out a slender existence.

Susan Larkin, in her book The Cos Cob Art Colony: Impressionists on the Connecticut Shore, wrote Twachtman’s obscurity freed him to experiment with new styles of painting:

Ironically, his lack of commercial success contributed to his artistic independence, freeing him from the temptation of producing salable pictures according to a proven formula. His art, conversation, and teaching fueled the creative fires of his friends and students in Cos Cob.

Cos Cob was to American Impressionism in the 1890s what Argenteuil was to French Impressionism in the 1870s, wrote Larkin.

Arques-la-Bataille, by John Henry Twachtman

John Henry Twachtman

John Henry Twachtman was born Aug. 4, 1853, in Cincinnati, Ohio, and studied painting with Frank Duveneck. Duveneck belonged to the city’s German-American community, and had studied art in Europe. His pupil followed his example.

John Henry Twachtman

In Paris, John Henry Twachtman adopted the soft, light-filled style of the French Impressionists. It was a departure from the realistic, detailed work of the Hudson River School that then predominated. But the art-buying public didn’t immediately embrace the brighter, more personal approach of the new generation of painters.

Twachtman moved to a farm in Greenwich, Conn., in 1886. He began to win medals, but he needed a day job to support his painting habit. So Twachtman and his good friend J. Alden Weir taught summer classes for the Art Students League at the Bush-Holley House, a boardinghouse overlooking the harbor in the Cos Cob section of Greenwich.

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Connecticut Shore by John Henry Twachtman

By 1890, the artistic community that gathered at the Bush-Holley House included Childe Hassam, Ernest Lawson and Theodore Robinson. There they tried new painting techniques and media.

John Henry Twachtman and his friends also explored a theme familiar to their French counterparts: the incursion of industrialization on the rural landscape. Greenwich was then evolving from a farming and fishing community to a wealthy New York suburb.

The Ten

Soon they got fed up with the conservatism of the era’s dominant art organizations. Twachtman, Weir and Hassam recruited Boston and New York artists who shared their mindset and formed The Ten American Painters in 1898. They asked Winslow Homer, who declined.

They originally called themselves The Eleven, as Abbott Handerson Thayer had joined, but he quickly dropped out.

The Ten, as they were nicknamed, held popular exhibitions every year in New York, then branched out to Boston and Philadelphia. They started out as ‘extremists,’ according to one critic, because of their impressionistic style.

But by the time of their last exhibit in the winter of 1917-18, the public considered them mainstream.

Winter Landscape, by John Henry Twachtman

Twachtman had died by then. While painting in Gloucester, Mass., he suddenly suffered a brain aneurysm. He died on Aug. 8, 1902, only 49 years old. His friends deeply mourned his passing.

Fishing Boats at Gloucester, by John Henry Twachtman

Today his works belong to the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art.

The Bush-Holley House is a National Historic Landmark. The Greenwich Historical Society bought the house in 1957 and turned it into a museum the next year.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Matilda Browne, Just One of the Boy Artists

Matilda Browne won so much respect from her fellow artists they let her paint on a door in Miss Florence Griswold’s house in Old Lyme, Conn.

Peonies, by Matilda Browne

The Old Lyme Art Colony, the most famous collection of artists in its day, mostly included men. Raucous Bohemians, they did not think much of women artists.

Matilda Browne was an exception — the only woman allowed to paint on one of the celebrated panels inside Miss Florence’s Georgian mansion. She was also the only woman portrayed in a mural painted by Henry Rankin Poore on the overmantle in the house. Called The Fox Chase, it caricatured 23 of the Old Lyme artists chasing after a fox. Poore depicted Matilda Browne with her arms raised in shock at the sight of Childe Hassam painting shirtless en plein air.

Matilda Browne at 25

A Good Neighbor

Matilda Browne was born May 8, 1869 in Newark, N.J. Her family lived next door to Thomas Moran, an acclaimed Hudson River School painter. Moran let nine-year-old Matilda visit him while he worked in his studio. Soon he let her experiment with his paint and canvas.

She impressed Moran with her talent and he encouraged her to take art lessons. At 12, National Academy of Design in New York accepted one of her flower paintings for an exhibition.

She loved to paint flowers and animals, especially ox-teams, horses, dairy cows and sheep. Her mother took her to Europe in 1889 to study with French and Dutch artists who specialized in painting animals. Her mother also bought calves from the local agricultural fair for Matilda to paint. When she finished the painting, she traded the calf for another.

In New York she studied with Carleton Wiggins. He not only painted livestock, but probably introduced her to the high-thinking, low-living summer art colony in Old Lyme, Conn. The Old Lyme art colony played an important role in incubating American Impressionism.

Acceptance

Matilda arrived in 1905, and the male artists immediately accepted her. But they disdained the young female art students they called ‘blots on the landscape.’ One of the Old Lyme artists, Willard Metcalf, painted an image of one of his young women students and called it Poor Little Bloticelli.

Inn the Garden by Matilda Browne

By the time Matilda Browne reached Old Lyme, she was the artistic equal of the men who boarded there over the summer. She had won a number of awards and, as one critic wrote, ‘she often wields her brush with almost masculine vigor.’ She was also stout, serious and a little lame, which probably inspired the men to treat her like a sister.

Her subject for the door panels? A pair of calves grazing peaceably.

Matilda Browne returned to Old Lyme periodically between 1911 and 1924. She also painted in Greenwich, Conn., at the Cos Cob Art Colony, and in New York City. Around 1918 she married writer Frederick van Wyck. She died in Greenwich on Nov. 3, 1947.

This story was updated in 2022.

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High Thinking and Low Living in Old Lyme

Florence Griswold suffered reversals of fortune that, in the end, transformed her beautiful old Georgian home into the Old Lyme Art Colony, the most famous collection of artists in its day. In the process, she gave Old Lyme, Conn., a new identity and shaped the careers of a generation of artists.

Boston Common at Dusk by Childe Hassam, member of the Old Lyme Art Colony

Florence Griswold

Florence Griswold was born Dec. 25, 1850 in Old Lyme, Conn., the youngest of four children. Her family was descended from early settlers of the town, and her father was a prosperous sea captain. In 1841 he bought a Georgian mansion on a 12-acre estate for his new bride.

Two decades later, the arrival of the Civil War and steam-powered vessels forced Florence’s father into early retirement. Bad investments cost him his fortune.

Old Lyme, once a prosperous shipbuilding town, fell on hard times as well.

So to make ends meet, Florence’s mother and two sisters in 1878 turned the rambling house into a school for girls. Then Florence and her sister Adele found themselves in a financial bind when their father, mother and sister died.

In 1892 the sisters started to take in boarders, an acceptable way for women to make money and a fortunate choice for Florence and the American art world.

Florence Griswold. Painting titled The Harpist by Alphonse Jongers, 1903. Courtesy Florence Griswold Museum.

The Old Lyme Art Colony

In 1899, artist Henry Ward Ranger came to Old Lyme, having just returned from the European art scene. He saw in the pretty coastal town an American version of France’s Barbizon, which spawned its own school of art.

Ranger rented a room from Miss Florence and encouraged his friends to come to Old Lyme. The next year, his friends Lewis Cohen, Henry Rankin Poore, Louis Paul Dessar, and William Henry Howe joined him. Two hundred more artists would pass through the colony over the next three decades, creating a school of art known as American Impressionism.

Florence Griswold called herself ‘the keeper of the art colony.” The artists called her Miss Florence. She charged $7 a week for a room, which included meals, a daily pitcher of water and a kerosene lamp to find one’s way to one’s rooms (or around the rooms) at night. She made sure the artists returned year after year by writing them during the winter.

Miss Florence also took a strong interest in the artists’ work and forever tried to sell their paintings. She turned the front hall into a gallery, where she sold the artists’ framed paintings and old furniture.

In August 1902, 12 of the artists put on an exhibition in the Old Lyme Public Library. The Hartford Courant reported the library was ‘thronged’ by visitors from Hartford, New Haven, Middletown, New York, New London, Boston, Chicago, Springfield and elsewhere.

Detail from May Night (1906) by Willard Metcalf, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. The painting depicts the Griswold house.

Childe Hassam Arrives

The success of the exhibit may have attracted Childe Hassam the next year. Hassam, a prolific and influential artist, then in his 40s, had a lot of friends. As the popularity of the summer exhibitions grew, some of the country’s best artists began making the pilgrimage to Old Lyme.

The artists turned barns and sheds into studios. They painted the First Congregational Church, the bridge nearby and old fruit orchards. Mountain laurel, which grew especially well in Old Lyme, was a favorite subject for many of the artists. One artists stuck cotton balls to laurel shrubs so he could paint them after their blossoms faded.

Miss Florence created a warm, cheerful atmosphere. She also provided a respectable veneer for the bohemian habits of the artists. Childe Hassam, in a July 3, 1905 letter, called the Griswold house ‘just the place for high thinking and low living.’ Archaeologists later discovered a stash of beer, wine and liquor bottles in the crawl space under Hassam’s studio.

Detail from “Church at Old Lyme,” oil on canvas, by Childe Hassam. Courtesy of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

No Inconsiderable Chapter

Caroline Weir Ely, daughter of artist J. Alden Weir, knew the Old Lyme Art Colony well.

“Miss Florence was the life of the house,” she wrote, “happy go lucky, always ready to get up a picnic, arbitrator of quarrels, and the first to lead the way to the abundant larder, which, night after night, was raided of its new cakes and pies.”

Miss Florence died in 1937. In her obituary, the New York Times wrote, “This generous spirit survives; and not in the Griswold House alone, but as part of no inconsiderable chapter in the history of our native art.”

Her legacy lives on in the renowned Florence Griswold Museum, the ‘Home of American Impressionism.’ You can visit the museum campus year round (click here for more information).

This story about the Old Lyme Art Colony was updated in 2022.

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J. Alden Weir, America’s Most Beloved Impressionist

This lovely drypoint etching, Christmas Greens, was created by J. Alden Weir, a Connecticut artist beloved in his time. His generosity toward younger and less fortunate artists won him many admirers, and his poetic images earned him many followers.

Christmas Greens, by J. Alden Weir. Library of Congress.

Alden Weir completed Christmas Greens during the American Etching Revival of the 1870s and 1880s. James McNeill Whistler inspired the revival at a time when the growing middle class wanted to buy art, but art it could afford.

J. Alden Weir

Weir was born in 1852, the 14^th of 16 children. He was raised in West Point, N.Y., where his father Robert Walker Weir taught drawing at the Military Academy at West Point. His father actually taught Whistler, who was later kicked out by then-Superintendent Robert E. Lee (yes, that Robert E. Lee) for misbehavior.

Alden Weir studied under his father and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He encountered the new school of painting known as Impressionism. It didn’t impress him. “I never in my life saw more horrible things,” he wrote to his parents in 1877. “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.”

Weir would then go on to found American Impressionism. Shortly after writing that letter that he began to soften about European Impressionism. In 1880 and 1881, Weir bought two paintings by Edouard Manet for a New York art collector, Erwin Davis.

Weir Farm

According to one story, Davis badly wanted a small landscape owned by Weir, and offered him $10 and a farm in Branchville, Conn., in exchange. Weir agreed and in 1883 moved to what would become Weir Farm, a creative refuge for friends, family and artists. (The farm is now a National Historic Site run by the National Park Service.)

According to other versions of the story, Weir Farm was owned by the family of his wife, Anna Baker. While there he strengthened his friendship with several other painters, Emil Carlson, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Childe Hassam, and John Henry Twachtman.

Anna and Caroline Weir

He would remain friends with Whistler, whom he met by chance in Europe. One day, the story goes, Weir was copying a painting by Velazquez in the National Gallery in London. He “became conscious of a man walking up and down, up and down past his easel, looking at his work. Finally he was heard to murmur, “Not bad – not bad at all!”

Were it not for Whistler, Weir might not have turned to etching. He might not have created Christmas Greens, which shows his wife Anna making a Christmas wreath with his daughter Caroline’s help.

Another Farm

Anna died in 1892, and Weir married her sister Ella the same year. The marriage brought him another farm in Windham, Conn. He generously helped people who suffered misfortune, raising money through painting exhibitions for people who lost their jobs in the Panic of 1893.

J. Alden Weir

His daughter Dorothy Weir Young then continued his legacy at Weir Farm. Dorothy, a painter, married sculptor Mahonri Young, Brigham Young’s grandson. Upon Young’s death, artists Sperry and Doris Andrews lived and worked at Weir Farm.

Julian Alden Weir died in 1919. “America has lost its most beloved artists,” wrote Hamilton Easter Field, founder of the Summer School of Graphic Arts in Ogunquit, Maine.

Factory Village by J. Alden Weir, 1897. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Weir’s paintings are on display in major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Phillips Collection, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art and the Wadsworth Athenaeum. The 60-acre grounds of Weir Farm open every day of the year to visitors.

This story was updated in 2022.

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