Anna (Primary Title)
Julian Alden Weir, American, 1852 - 1919 (Artist)
Better known for his later association with the “Ten,” a group of loosely defined American impressionists, Julian Alden Weir began his career working in a more dramatic realist style. In works such as Anna, which evokes lessons learned in Europe, Weir emulated the black-on-black bravura painting of Frans Hals and Edouard Manet that appealed to many progressive American artists.
An avid collector of Japanese and colonial American artifacts, Weir married into an old Connecticut family. The portraits he made of his wife, Anna Dwight Baker, in pseudohistorical garb may be understood as testaments to her patrician identity as well as self-consciously decorative productions. In this example, Weir captured the elegant reverie of his young wife as a contemplative Priscilla Mullins, whose life in the first years of the Puritan Plymouth Colony was romanticized in verse by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the post-centennial era.
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