Julian Alden Weir Overview

Julian Alden Weir (1852 – 1919) was a leading American Impressionist painter and member of the Cos Cob Art Colony near Greenwich, Connecticut. Weir became associated with first generation of American Impressionists and in 1898 was one of the founding members of “The Ten”, a group of artists dissatisfied with professional art organizations, including Childe Hassam, Edmund Tarbell, and John Henry Twachtman, who were reacting against the entrenched values of the National Academy and the Society of American Artists.

Weir was born and raised in West Point, New York, August 30, 1852. He was the youngest of sixteen children of Robert Walter Weir, a drawing instructor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. His older brother, John Ferguson Weir, also became a well-known landscape artist who painted in the styles of the Hudson River and Barbizon schools and first director of the art program at Yale University.