Our Featured Painting:
The Two Sisters
by Julian Alden Weir
In the introduction to the catalogue of the Memorial Exhibition of the Works of Julian Alden Weir, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1924, the prominent art critic William Coffin wrote that Weir’s portraits, “whether of men or of women . . . always possess an air of distinction.” Coffin went on to single out, Weir’s The Two Sisters as “one of the best works to cite as an example . . . for not only are there inherent grace and charm but there is also good style as painting.” Coffin remarked, “There is no need to be told that these two figures are ladies. The picture tells you at a glance.”

Weir began The Two Sisters in the 1890s, a time when he was well established and had reached his artistic maturity, especially in the realm of figure painting. Indeed, the figure had been an emphasis for Weir since the beginning of his career. In 1869, after leaving his father’s tutelage in his native West Point, New York, his training at the National Academy of Design in New York from 1869 through 1872 consisted primarily of copying antique casts. The basis of his approach to the figure was instilled, however, during the years 1873 through 1877, which he spent in Paris, receiving instruction from the prominent academic painter Jean Léon Gérôme. From Gérôme, Weir learned to develop a careful method in which he composed his pictures conscientiously, often working from preliminary sketches that he improved until they became arranged and balanced paintings. He learned to emphasize strong contrasts of light and shade and to pay more attention to the movement of the figure rather than to detail or high finish.

Gérôme communicated his high regard for the old masters to Weir, and the young artist spent his free time in Paris carefully studying the work of Rembrandt, Hals, Rubens, Van Dyck, and Velázquez. The art of Hals and Velázquez was especially inspiring to Weir. Later in his career, he often emulated Hals by portraying figures in three-quarters frontal poses and applying his paint in bold strokes of creamy pigment. Velázquez’s art was compelling enough to lure Weir to Spain in the summer of 1876, and Weir took his cue from the Spanish painter in many of his figural works in which he limited his images to a narrow range of tones and used a brush handling that was painterly and yet very controlled. Besides Gérôme, the other contemporary artist to influence Weir during his Parisian years was the French pleinairiste Jules Bastien-Lepage, with whom Weir struck up a deep and lasting friendship. A painter of rural landscapes usually featuring dignified peasant field workers, Bastien captured subtle effects of atmospheric light on landscapes and figures alike, creating a naturalistic art that was a compromise between traditional and modern approaches. Weir followed Bastien’s example in landscapes of the 1880s; many of his figural works also evoke Bastien’s work in their emphasis on contemplative subjects, especially women, who are both humble and majestic.

During the early 1880s, the figure continued to be the mainstay of Weir’s art. Rendered during his early years in New York, these works tended to be dark and quite conservative, but by the middle of the decade, as he began to depict the more intimate subjects of his wife Anna and his daughter Caro (born 1884), he synthesized academic ideals with a more progressive approach, placing his subjects in the foreground of his compositions, close to the picture plane, and using a style of greater technical freedom. In the next decade, he would experiment in a number of figural works with the Impressionist approach that he was using in his landscapes. However, for the majority of his figural works, he continued to explore the same principles and stylistic directions that he had been slowly evolving over the course of his career.

The Two Sisters represents the culmination of his figural art. The work portrays two sisters, Jean Ross (left) and Elsie Ross (right) of South Lee, Massachusetts, one of whom was a bridesmaid in Weir’s wedding to Anna Dwight Baker in April of 1883. The sisters, neither of whom ever married, visited Weir and his family every winter, at least until Anna’s death in the winter of 1892. (Weir married to her sister Ella in October of 1893.) Two photographs from the Archives of Weir Farm National Historic Site include images of this painting. The first shows apparently unfinished in Weir’s Branchville Studio—his painting Upland Pasture (ca. 1905; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.) may be seen framed on an easel. The second photograph is from a scrapbook collection and shows the painting hung in the Marshall Field residence. The inscription on the scrapbook page is in the hand of Weir’s daughter Dorothy and reads: “photograph sent to me by Mrs. Marshall Field!”

In the foreground of a darkly atmospheric interior, the Ross sisters, dressed in elegant yet simple white old-fashioned gowns, are shown in three-quarters view and placed in the foreground of the picture plane. The figures are idealized, but real, representing that middleground between academic perfection and emotional believability that Weir strove to achieve. The figure at the left, Jean, is dark haired, wears a round-necked gown with short puffed sleeves and a V-shaped bodice and gold hair clip that is visible as a glint of light in the dark space. She holds a piece of white fabric, probably a silk handkerchief. The figure at the right, Elsie, is blond, and wears a high-necked, long sleeved dress tied with a sash. She languidly holds a round Chinese fan decorated in a gold brocade. Against the background wall a tapestry of deep green and gold may be discerned, while a gold frame gleams at the left and a ceramic vase with two roses appears in the low light at the right.

With the figures positioned so closely together that their hands are linked and their heads almost touching, the painting conveys the close understanding between the two sisters. Yet, each figure is turned in a slightly different direction and they look past each other, their gazes veering off in opposite directions. They appear to be focused on their inner thoughts rather than on each other or on the outside world. The effect is to make us aware of their inward lives rather than their outward appearances. We also note that their affection for each other may include a certain physical closeness, but it also involves a mental and spiritual dimension. Charles de Kay aptly observed in the New York Times, upon seeing the work at the 1915 exhibition of the Ten American Painters at Knoedler Gallery in New York, that the two sisters reveal a “delicate unfathomable poetry [that] would make of any exhibition an event long to be held in memory.”

Both figures are refined, yet there are subtle differences between them. Jean, her dark hair and graceful swanlike neck emphasized by her low-cut gown, has a directness in her expression that suggests determination and confidence. By contrast, Elsie, the blond sister has a slight tilt to her head, her calmer expression suggesting absorption and kindness. The differences in the facial expressions and the subtleties of the figures’ poses result in a work that emphasizes mood and attitude. The painting thus exemplifies the popular late nineteenth-century notion that women were endowed with a capacity for an intellectual and spiritual existence and that the physical world was of less importance to them then their thoughts, emotions, and beliefs.

Weir’s painting method in The Two Sisters reflects the coalescence of all of his sources of inspiration. The expressive poses of the figures and their balance between idealization and realism evokes the art of Velázquez, while Weir’s strong and forceful brushwork, blending of thick pigments on canvas, and his attention to subtle tonal shifts in reflective surfaces and dark backgrounds alike reveals the inspiration of Hals. The richly built up surface is also suggestive of the influence of the art of Weir’s friend Albert Pinkham Ryder. Weir’s use of a wide range of closely related tones also evokes the art of Bastien, while the harmonious effect of the subtle tonal range and the carefully arranged composition elicit comparison with the art of James McNeill Whistler. The psychological component of the work also suggests an affinity with Whistler’s portraits.

Although Weir painted The Two Sisters in the 1890s, he does not appear to have exhibited the painting until 1915, when he showed it along with three landscapes at the 1915 exhibition of the Ten American Painters, held at Knoedler Gallery in New York. Of the works in the exhibition, The Two Sisters was among the most highly commended. Writing for the Globe and Commercial Advertiser, the distinguished critic Arthur Hoeber commented that Weir’s contributions to the show “stood out prominently” and

are so spontaneous and delightful [that] one must pay tribute to them before anything else is said; this season he has fairly surpassed himself, given us, as it were, the fine flower of his experimentation, thought, analysis, and his own personality, and in these two pictures he is to be commended as not before.
The first is a large canvas, a double portrait of “The Sisters,” two beautiful young women, simply poised, in white. Handled with rare simplicity, with delightful refinement, the charm of youth, the fine qualities of intimacy and tenderness, are all expressed in a masterly manner. When one has admired the general beauty of the canvas one is conscious of quite astonishing craftsmanship in addition also to the humanity which the artist so well conveys.

Writing for the New York Tribune, the well known art writer Royal Cortissoz stated that “Mr. Weir, like Mr. Dewing, confirms our faith in the technical habit that has a streak of genius in it. He cannot touch a canvas without lending it a curious, quietly glowing life.” Of The Two Sisters, he noted that the painting of the two dresses, “both very light in tone, was obviously difficult” and that “from the entire canvas there breathes the quality of an original searcher after beauty.” In the New York Evening Mail, Joseph Edgar Chamberlin, reported that “The most remarkable piece of portraiture in the exhibition is J. Alden Weir’s ‘Two Sisters.’ It is a fascinating study of two . . . girls in dazzling white, standing with their heads brought so close together that the picture seems to be cross-eyed. It is so . . . vividly primitive in treatment that a great effect of reality and strength is obtained, and one has no hesitation in accepting the picture as an original, striking, and probably truthful piece of portraiture.”

The critic for the New York Evening Post commented that “In his portrait of two sisters and in his landscape Alden Weir again strikes the note of distinction, of subtle modulation, and of reserve. . . . Both works have a touch of poetry and imagination that raises them above the level of their literal neighbors. They have the air of having been painted, not for a moment’s approval, but for the approval of time.” De Kay, as noted above found the painting evocative and mysterious and noted that Weir had against “invented difficulties,” explaining that Weir had succeeded where his followers had failed using a technique that “in his hands . . . leads to masterpieces.” He concluded by remarking: The ‘Two Sisters’ is a masterpiece.”

A work that is refined and poetic without the overt sentimentalization of so many of the era’s images of white-garbed contemplative women, The Two Sisters is a testament to Weir’s long years of painting the figure, revealing his confident and adept technique and his exploration of the genre’s expressive possibilities.


LNP


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