The Greenwich Boat Club,

1833

A prolific artist, influential teacher, and ­progenitor of an important family of American painters, Robert Walter Weir was long a mainstay of the artistic community revolving around New York during the mid-nineteenth century. This masterpiece of his early career 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, despite the sober circumstances, the painting is a classic genre scene in its broad appeal and illustration of daily life, yet it also contains elements of the so-called conversation piece, a type of group portrait in which recognizable individuals are portrayed, full-length but small in scale, in informal surroundings. The survival of a related journal and other archival materials make it 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. <em>The Greenwich Boat Club</em>, named after one such environ, recalls the time Weir spent during the epidemic sailing in the fresh air of the Hudson River in the borrowed boat of his student Walter Oddie, depicted at the painting’s far left. In the scene, the group has struck camp on the New Jersey shore, and the men are busy with the instruments that define them as artists, writers, and musicians, their particularization by profession providing a tableau of the period’s emergent bourgeois democratic culture. The painting’s appeal was noted from its appearance the year it was completed in the National Academy of Design’s annual exhibition, a review of which concludes: "[I]t [may be] hazardous to say this is Mr. Weir’s best picture, and yet we believe we must say it."