Julian Alden Weir (American, 1852-1919) Portrait of a Woman, 1910
Oil on canvas, 39 5/8 x 32 1/4 in.
Collection Everson Museum of Art. Museum purchase, Friends of American Art Fund.

Julian Alden Weir (1852-1919) was both the son and brother of notable nineteenth-century artists. Taught initially by his father, who also counted James Abbott MacNeill Whistler among his pupils, Weir received conventional academic training first at the National Academy of Design, then at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and with the great French academician Jean Leon Gerume. Paris of the mid-1870s was also the milieu of the Impressionists, but it was artists like Jules Bastien-Lepage who had the greater influence on the work of the young Weir. Although voicing an initial distaste for the Impressionist experiments, through his friendship with Bastien-Lepage Weir eventually became interested in the depiction of outdoor light and subjects and for plein-air painting. As time went on, Weir's work was to be characterized by its preoccupation with nuances of color and the subtleties of atmospheric gradation rendered with the broken, painterly brushwork often associated with Impressionist painting.

With his contemporaries John Henry Twatchman and Childe Hassam, Weir founded the Ten American Painters (or the Ten) in 1898, a leading group of American artists who are characteristically referred to as American Impressionists, although their connection sprang more from friendship and a desire for exhibition reform than to stylistic similarities. Thanks to a wide array of influences, ranging from Gerume and Bastien-Lepage to Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Japanese prints, and his American colleagues Twatchman, Hassam, and Albert Pinkham Ryder, Weir's oeuvre cannot be said to belong to any one school or movement. Throughout his career, he experimented with the assortment of styles that were to be found during his career.

The Everson's painting by Weir is a work of quiet mood and introspection. It is one of a number of lyrical paintings of women he completed during the last decade of his life. The sitter, his middle daughter Dorothy, is shown lost in thought, seemingly unaware of the artist who paints her. She is seen from above, seated at a table in a shimmering evening gown, shown in a three-quarter-profile view, cropped at the knees. The compositional space is shallow, the foreground cut away, and the dark brown furniture is wedged up against a vaguely patterned backdrop. These compositional elements angle in and, abruptly, up--a table from the left and a chair from the right serve to frame the lower portion of Dorothy's shimmering white gown. The sitter does not pose for this portrait; instead, it is as if she were caught in a private moment. These compositional devices betray the influence of the Japanese woodblock prints the artist is known to have collected. The fragmented composition, elevated view, placement of the figure in an ambiguous space, and subject's natural, transient posture are characteristics that conform to a Japanese aesthetic rather than the formal conventions of western portraiture.