Signed lower left. Sight: H: 6 3/4; W: 5 1/4 inches. Frame: H: 15 7/8; W: 12 5/8 inches. Prov: NYC Print Fair Condition: excellent Shipping weight: 3 lbs Biography from The Columbus Museum of Art, Georgia Art, family, and home played key roles in the early childhood of Julian Alden Weir, who was one of sixteen children. His first art teacher was his father, who taught drawing at West Point Military Academy. As a young man, Weir traveled to Paris and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts with Jean-Léon Gérôme. Four years later, he returned to the United States and began teaching at the Art Students League in New York. Weir's art reflected his academic training until the 1880s, when he was drawn to the influence of Impressionism. His landscapes, which initially revealed his admiration for the Barbizon school, had become distinctly impressionistic by the 1890s. Initially, Weir's reaction to Impressionism paintings was far from enthusiastic. After attending an exhibition, he wrote, "I never in my life saw more horrible things... They do not observe drawing or form but give you an impression of what they call nature. It was worse than the Chamber of Horrors. I was there about a quarter of an hour and left with a head ache." (1) His late conversion to impressionist was encouraged by his friends John Henry Twachtman and Theodore Robinson. Weir became one of the founding members of Ten American Painters, a group that developed in 1898 in reaction against the restrictive exhibition practices of the Society of American Artists. In 1882 Weir purchased a large farm in Branchville, Connecticut, where he built his studio. The farm and its environs served as the artist's primary subject matter for the next thirty years, and it became a favorite gathering place for his circle of friends, which then included Twachtman, Robinson, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Childe Hassam, John Singer Sargent, and others.(2)