It is not often that a significant early American genre painting becomes available on the market, particularly a work at once appealing, superbly executed, unusually well documented, in excellent condition, and with a fine provenance. The museum is thus especially fortunate to have recently acquired The Greenwich Boat Club (1833), Robert Weir’s early masterpiece and one of the most compelling genre scenes of the Jacksonian era, the crucial formative period in the American development of that type of painting.

 

Known today as much for his influential role as a teacher as for his own art, Robert Walter Weir (1803–1889) was a mainstay of the artistic community revolving around New York during the mid-nineteenth century. Instructor of drawing at West Point for forty-two years, he devoted himself to portraiture, landscape, and figurative art, but is perhaps best remembered for history paintings such as Embarkation of the Pilgrims (1837–43), commissioned for the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol Building. Weir was also progenitor of an important family of American artists, notably his children and students John Ferguson Weir, founder of Yale University’s School of Art, and seminal American Impressionist Julian Alden Weir.

 

The Greenwich Boat Club depicts a group of the artist’s friends seeking recreation and respite from a cholera outbreak in New York. Unusual among Weir’s generally more staid works for its engaging portrayal of leisure (even under sober circumstances), it is, in its broad appeal and illustration of daily life, a characteristic genre scene, yet might equally be considered a “conversation piece,” a type of group portrait—almost unknown in this country—in which recognizable individuals are portrayed, full-length but small in scale, in informal surroundings. Due to the survival of a related journal and other archival materials, it is possible to reconstruct the particulars of the scene to a degree matching the picture’s unusual detail. In the summer of 1832, New York was alarmed by the arrival of a cholera epidemic from Europe and Asia, where it had claimed thousands of lives. Many New Yorkers fled to the clean, open areas just north of the crowded city. The Greenwich Boat Club, named after one such environ (current Greenwich Village),recalls the time Weir passed sailing in the fresh air of the Hudson River in the borrowed boat of his student Walter Oddie—probably one of the two figures depicted at the painting’s far left.

 

In the scene, the group has struck camp on the New Jersey shore, and each man is busy with the instruments that define them by profession as artists, writers, and musicians, while in the background, under the tent formed by their sail, another figure is preparing a meal from ample provisions. The known circumstances of the work’s production and extensive critical reception enable singularly comprehensive insight into the time and place in which it was produced, notably the consolidation during the period of a distinctly American bourgeois democratic culture. It is, moreover, in its quality of composition, color, execution, and anecdotal detail, simply a delight to behold. It seems evidently a picture Weir enjoyed painting and was one upon which he clearly lavished a great deal of attention. Its particular appeal among the artist’s varied works was noted from its appearance the year it was completed in the National Academy of Design’s annual exhibition, a review of which concludes, “it [may be] hazardous to say this is Mr. Weir’s best picture, and yet we believe we must say it.”

 

Karl Kusserow