Since 1903, members of Arts and Letters have delivered commemorative tributes to fellow members who have passed away. These remarks celebrate and reflect on the lives and work of the members being honored and acknowledge their contribution to the arts. A selection of tributes is now available in the digital archive below. As we prepared this archive, we were reminded that these tributes reflect their times, and, in some instances, include terminology and social and moral judgments we do not endorse.
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By his comrades of the studios Julian Alden Weir was admired for his brilliant talent, esteemed for his character, and beloved for his personality.
His character, indeed, was to catch immediately the imagination of the young, of those who were his contemporaries in Paris. To the American students of the early seventies his name was already notable. The Americans of the Rive Gauche surrounded him, and the men, too, of the Rive Droite, of Montmartre, learned to think of him as of one who had "arrived" d'emblée, in the opinion of his French comrades, as the friend of Bastien and other protagonists of the advanced movement of the day, and they knew him personally as the bluff, genial, handsome athlete who later was perpetuated in the bronze of Olin Warner's beautiful bust. He was not only a hard worker at his easel but an active participant in every kind of jollity, quite ready also to bite his thumb at either Montague or Capulet if he thought them untrue to the principles of their art.
For Weir was essentially an artist. Like Thayer, he never for a moment compounded with his principle, but, unlike Thayer, he now and then compounded with his own opinion, or at any rate was baffled by it momentarily. He was elusive and sometimes unequal; today you would find him painting with profoundest subtility and convictions, and tomorrow trying an experiment which perhaps surprised his admirers, and which, once proven unsatisfactory, he abandoned the day after tomorrow without regret.
High distinctions always accompanied his hours of best inspiration and never entirely failed him. The fugitive and almost impossible delicacy of flowers he fixed as few have been able to do, and his mastery of white, that basic and most noble pigment, was rare and was shown with extraordinary skill and feeling throughout all his work. Whether you agreed with him, as you usually did, or disagreed, you felt the sincerity of his work; for he did not play to the gallery or think about making his spectators "sit up."
Although very simple and direct of speech, he was widely as well as deeply cultured in art, and was a critic who could back up in discussion his natural flair in the discovery of interesting work by other men.
He painted portraits, figures, and flowers; and he passed through a phase which testified to the fascination which New York after twilight offers in its piled-up lighted windows of business buildings. But often he turned and returned to landscape, for he was emphatically one of those people of Browning's Artemis, who "love green haunts and loneliness," and was always ready for deep woods and for fishermen's camps.
In the various and sometimes varying artistic camps, too, he was honored. He was one of "The Ten" whose talent has given so much impulse to the healthier side of so-called "advanced work," and he was also a beloved president of the Academy of Design, resigning the office only when fatigue and illness compelled him to do so.
He was born August 30, 1852, and was elected a member of the Academy November 18, 1915. He died December 8, 1919. His name will be remembered with pride and affection by his fellows of the Academy and by a host of artist comrades.