Figural
JULIAN ALDEN WEIR (1852–1919)
Dorothy, 1893
Oil on canvas, 33 1/2 x 23 7/8 in.
RECORDED: The Century Club, New York, J. Alden Weir: An Appreciation of His Life and Works (1921), p. 131
EX COLL.: the artist; to his daughter, Dorothy Weir Young (Mrs. Mahonri McIntosh Young) (1890–1947); to her stepdaughter, Agnes Young (Mrs. Oliver I. Lay); to her son, Charles Lay, until 1983; to [Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, 1983–84]; to private collection, and by descent, until the present
Dorothy depicts Weir’s daughter, Dorothy, painted in 1893, when she was three years old. The painting was executed during a period of maturation of Weir’s style, when he was assimilating disparate influences into his work. Weir was busy for much of 1893 painting a large mural for the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, and once he completed the mural project he returned to easel painting. The works he executed immediately thereafter show the progressive development of Weir’s style at that time, especially his debt to Japanese prints.
Weir crops the composition to focus up close on the small figure of his daughter, who is placed off-center toward the right side of the composition and whose flattened figure is represented by loose cross-hatchings of gray and blue color. The cropped image of the bed behind her, painted as a subtly varying region of near-uniform color, recedes along a sharp diagonal. Dorothy’s face, however, is painted sensitively and with careful shading and modeling. This charming portrait of Weir’s daughter is an outstanding example of Weir’s work of the mid-1890s, when his style was at its most daring and modern.
