Edwin Lord Weeks Paintings

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Edwin Lord Weeks Biography

American Academic Classical artist
born 1849 - died 1903

Student of: Léon Bonnat (1833-1922)

Along with Bridgman, Edwin Lord Weeks is one of the most celebrated of the American Orient lists, this certainly being so during his lifetime, and although quite a lot is recorded concerning his professional career and travels, much of this from his own extensive travel writings, relatively little is known about his private life.

Weeks' parents were affluent spice and tea merchants from Newton, a suburb of Boston and as such they were able to accept, probably encourage, and certainly finance their son's youthful interest in painting and travelling. As a young man Edwin Lord Weeks visited the Florida Keys to draw and also travelled to Surinam in South America. Earliest known Edwin Lord Weeks paintings date from 1867 when Edwin Lord Weeks was eighteen years old, although it is not until his Landscape with Blue Heron, dated 1871 and painted in the Everglades, that Edwin Lord Weeks started to exhibit a dexterity of technique and eye for composition - presumably having taken professional tuition.

Aged 21 Edwin Lord Weeks is known to have opened a studio in Newton, in the same year marrying Frances Rollins Hale from New Hampshire. The following year, accompanied by a friend, the illustrator A P Close, Edwin Lord Weeks travelled to Egypt, the Holy Land and Syria as far as Damascus. His sketchbooks from that visit overflow with North African scenes. However, at Beirut, Close died following a fever and was buried there. A Edwin Lord Weeks painting depicting the port of Tangiers dated 1872 survives from this period and appears to be one of the first of Edwin Lord Weeks paintings in the Orientalist style. During a brief stay in Marocco around this time it is likely that Edwin Lord Weeks encountered the Scottish Royal Academician Robert Gavin (1827-1883) who lived and worked in Tangiers during the 1870's.

After Weeks' return to Newton, Boston journals published their description of his new subject matter and also enthusiastically critiqued an exhibition of Edwin Lord Weeks paintings held at the Boston Art Club - early evidence of his increasing stature as an artist, at least in his home town. The Boston Daily Eving Transcript of 23rd June 1874 announced that Edwin Lord Weeks would soon be embarking for Europe and a season in Paris before returning to the Orient to study the magnificent colours found there.

In 1883 Edwin Lord Weeks travelled to India and, according to his own letters, spent every day painting and every night developing his photographs, which Edwin Lord Weeks probably used for recording the architectural details and backgrounds for his compositions. Edwin Lord Weeks was to return again in 1892, commissioned by Harper's Magazine, this time accompanied by the journalist Theodore Child who was to write a series of articles on their travels with illustrations by Weeks. Foreseeing a daunting overland journey, they planned to set off from St.Petersburg and to take the Tran Caspian railway to Samarkand then descending via Herat to Afghanistan - a comfortable journey for the greater part, becoming more adventurous after Samarkand. However, an outbreak of cholera in the Russian provinces to the north prevented this and, instead, they decided to follow the ancient caravan route from Trebizond on the Black Sea as far as Tabriz and from there across Kurdistan.

He was able to spend the next thirteen years in a splendid residence with a huge atelier on the Avenue de Wagram before moving nearer to the Bois de Boulogne.

In 1896 Edwin Lord Weeks was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour and he continued to paint right up to his death in 1903, which is thought to have been due to an illness contracted in India. An obituary notice described him as "a reserved man with a quiet voice and of rather small stature, but virile, kindly and affable".