J. Alden Weir: 

Our Unstamped Artist

A half dozen Ridgefield artists have been celebrated on U.S. postage stamps. Some, like Frederic Remington and Charles Sheeler, have been honored on more than one stamp. Yet J. Alden Weir, whose homestead is now the only National Historic Site commemorating an American painter, has been unrecognized philatelically.

Except in the Central African Republic, which has issued several stamps in his honor and where he no doubt never set foot.

The artist will, however, be remembered on the Weir Farm National Historic Site Quarter, which is scheduled to be released in 2020 as part of the U.S. Mint’s “America the Beautiful Quarters Program.” 

Born in 1852 at West Point, N.Y., Julian Alden Weir got his first training as an artist from his father, Robert Weir,  a painter who spent more than four decades teaching drawing at the U.S. Military Academy. He took courses at the National Academy of Design and in 1873 went to Paris where he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and became enchanted with the concept of the plein air painting — working outdoors amid nature. He was also introduced to Impressionism, but was not at all enchanted, calling the style “worse than the Chamber of Horrors.”

He returned to the U.S. in 1877, but continued to return frequently to Europe, working at times with Eduoard Manet and James McNeill Whistler (he described Whistler as a “first-class specimen of an eccentric man”). He began exhibiting his paintings in Paris and other cities including, of course, New York, where he taught painting at the Art Students League and Cooper Union, did

portrait commissions, and had his home.

In 1882,  Erwin Davis, for whom Weir had procured a number of pieces of art in Europe, saw a painting that Weir had just acquired for $560 (about $14,700 today). Davis wanted the painting and offered Weir an old Beers family farmhouse at Nod Hill Road and Pelham Lane in Ridgefield, along with 152 acres in both Wilton and Ridgefield, in exchange for the painting and $10 cash.

Though he had had a place in the Adirondacks, Weir loved the Connecticut farm, “drawn to the modest-scale scenery in Branchville — the meadows of corn and grass, the apple trees, the rocky terrain, the stone walls, the English-style barns, and the small red Greek Revival farmhouse,” Jay Axelbank wrote in The New York Times in 1999.

Weir subsequently expanded the farm to 238 acres and over the years he lived there, continued to maintain it as a working farm. Today,  60 acres belong to the Weir Farm National Historic Site, and another 110 acres are permanently protected by the Weir Farm Art Center, formerly the Weir Preserve.

For the artist, the farm became the inspiration for many paintings and encouraged his move to Impressionism. Weir often painted outdoors there, and invited many of his friends to do the same. Among his visitors were Childe Hassam, Albert Pinkham Ryder, John Singer Sargent, and John Twachtman, all of them Impressionists. By the early 1890s, he considered himself an Impressionist.

While he is most widely known for his oil paintings, Weir was an accomplished artist in watercolors, etching, and stained glass. He painted not only landscapes, but many portraits and figure

studies. Today his works are in most major American museums of art, and in many European museums.

In 1882 Weir met Anna Dwight Baker, who was a 19-year-old student in his art class. It was love at first sight; the couple was engaged three weeks later, and married the next year.  Anna Weir was the subject of scores of paintings and etchings by her husband, many of which are now in museums and galleries. “She is remembered today as one of Julian’s staunchest supporters and his artistic inspiration,” says a Weir Farm profile of her.

They  had three daughters: Caroline, Dorothy and Cora. A son, Julian Alden Jr., died as an infant. Anna died 10 days after Cora’s birth in 1892. Later that year Julian married Anna’s sister, Ella Baker, who had been helping take care of his children, and he also inherited the Baker family farm in Windham, where he would also stay and paint. (His family still owns the farm.) Ella, who had also studied painting, became more interested in photography and practiced the art much of her life.

By the 20th Century Weir had become a major figure in American art. A founder of the Society of American Artists, he served as its president and also led the National Academy of Design and the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. He was on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

J. Alden Weir died in 1919, but the farm continued to be the home of artists for many decades to come. Ella lived on the Branchville farm with her stepdaughter, Dorothy, until her death in 1930. A year later, Dorothy married Mahroni Young, the noted sculptor, who moved to the farm and expanded its barn studio. Young created the sculptures for his famous Mormon monument, “This Is the Place,” in his studio at the farm and they were transported by train to their huge pedestal outside

Salt Lake City.

Dorothy died in 1947 and Young, 10 years later. The farm was then purchased by Sperry and Doris Andrews, husband and wife artists who had been friends of Young. They lived the rest of their lives there and spearheaded the efforts that led to its becoming a National Park site in 1990.

Weir’s older brother, John Ferguson Weir, was also a well-known landscape artist, but chiefly of the Hudson River school. In 1869 he was hired as a professor of painting and design at Yale University, where he created the first academic art program on an American college campus.

John stayed at the Branchville farm while Julian and Anna were on their honeymoon in Europe. At one point he wrote his brother, “I advise you to hang on to this place, old boy; a ‘lonesome lodge’ which a pleasant place of retreat in times of storm or drought is no bad thing to have — for an artist. Keep it trim and untrammeled and you will find it a haven of refuge.”

Joseph Knoche: 

An Artist in Rock

Most artists work in media like paint, metal, stone, or fabrics. Joe Knoche worked in rocks — good, old, Connecticut countryside rocks. Like few others could, he created stone walls, fireplaces and foundations that have lasted more than a century and show no sign of deteriorating — unless at the hands of man. 

His craftsmanship was so good that one of America’s leading artists of the 20th Century drew him at work many times.

Joseph John Knoche was born in Germany in 1868. When he was 14, his family moved to New York City where he apprenticed as a stonecutter at a cemetery. In 1893, he decided to come to Ridgefield, perhaps drawn by the need here for fine stonemasonry work on the many estates that were being built then. He and his mother moved to Pelham Lane on the Ridgefield-Wilton border.

Knoche established his own contracting business, with several employees. They did masonry

work on many of the large new and renovated “summer cottages,” as the estates were called.

Among the first walls he did were on the South Salem farm of a Dr. Agnew, which later became the home of U.S. Vice President Henry A. Wallace. He did Henry deB. Schenck’s new estate on Tackora Trail, which became the Mamanasco Lake Lodge, the Jesuits’ Manresa retreat house and now Christ the King religious center. And he worked on the new home of artist Frederic Remington on Barry Avenue. 

For these and other projects Knoche would often do the foundations and fireplaces, and then would frequently build a stone wall along the front of the property or rebuild an old wall. In some cases he would also wall off  gardens or fields.

 Around 1918, Knoche gave up general masonry contracting to concentrate practically exclusively on dry walls — that is, walls that employ no mortar, and are held together by the shape, weight and position of the rocks. And he was good at it.

“Everybody didn’t make dry walls the way Joe did,” said his daughter, Teresa Knoche Sheehy in an unpublished 1961 interview with Ridgefield Press reporter Peter W. Roberts. “He fit them right, he cut them correctly.”

The virtue of a dry wall is its appearance, she said. 

“It’s more difficult than a wet one,” she pointed out. And when mortar was occasionally demanded by an employer, he would always conceal it. 

 Among the many homes on which he created rock walls and other stone structures were:

• The John H. Lynch place on West Mountain Road, now the Ridgefield Academy and its campus.
  
• “Oreneca,” the West Mountain estate of  P.D. Wagoner, the Underwood Typewriter magnate, later the home of rare book collector Harrison Horblit.
  
• The Rainsford estate on the Ridgefield-South Salem line, which in recent years has been Le Chateau restaurant.
  
• Sunset Hall, the Old West Mountain estate that was the country retreat of several prominent New York businessman and, for many years,  the home of actor Robert Vaughn and now the home of Dick Cavett, the television interviewer.
  
• The Jonathan Bulkley estate on Rippowam Road, still owned today by the same family that established it more than a century ago.
  
• The very visible and tall wall at the corner of High Ridge and Barry Avenue that surrounds the former Sereno T. Jacob home. (Jacob, a World War I fighter pilot and feisty town official, gave two reasons for commissioning this wall: To keep his small children safe from traffic at the busy intersection, and to protect the public from his rather aggressive police dog.)
  
• Many long walls on the estate of Louis Morris Starr at the corner of Farmingville and Lounsbury Roads.
  

However, nowhere in the area is his work better known and appreciated than at the J. Alden Weir homestead along Nod Hill Road and Pelham Lane, now the National Park Service’s Weir Farm. Considered one of the great American Impressionist artists, Weir used Knoche’s talents to build walls

at his farm. So did his daughter, Cora Weir Burlingham,  who commissioned Knoche to erect more than a mile and a half of walls there. Knoche started that project in 1938 when he was 71 years old.

“Apparently, Mahonri Young liked to tease his sister-in-law, and the ‘Great Wall of Cora’ was his name for the system of elegantly constructed dry stone walls that Cora Burlingham had local mason Joe Knoche design and build on the property,” said Dr. Cynthia Zaitzevsky in a 1996 National Park Service report. “It is not yet clear whether Cora had a grand plan for the stone walls or whether they evolved incrementally, but they seem to have been completed by the late 1940s.”

  Mahroni Young was so taken by Knoche’s work that he drew many pen-and-ink sketches of the mason at work. The best-known shows him working on that “Great Wall of Cora.” 

“Joe Knoche and his men were one of Young’s favorite subjects,” said Dr.  Zaitzevsky. “He did numerous sketches of them, resulting in the etching [accompanying this profile], which shows the construction of one of the walls to the north of the house. The north side of the toolshed is also visible. 

“None of Young’s Knoche sketches and etchings is dated, but they must have been done in

the 1940s,” she said. (Young, who is also profiled in Who Was Who, is especially known for his huge sculpture of his grandfather, Brigham Young, outside Salt Lake City, Utah.)

Despite time, weather, vandals, and even rock thieves, Knoche’s walls are still a prominent part of Weir Farm and line both sides of Pelham Lane where the Weirs, Youngs, Burlinghams, and Knoche himself lived. (In modern times Knoche’s grandson, also named Joe Knoche and who also lives on Pelham Lane, has done much carpentry work on Weir Farm.)

In the late 1930s, Knoche took a break from wall building to work on his own plan for a monument to the memory of J. Alden Weir. “The monument was to have been built on an island in what is known as Weir’s Pond,” according to Peter Roberts’ profile of the mason. Knoche spent

weeks in the woods at his home,  searching for a granite ledge from which he could cut stone for columns and haul them out by truck. He found such a spot and “at once began his work of quarrying out these granite columns. He was several months at this project and each column was a masterpiece.” Each was a foot square and six feet long.

The final monument was never built, however.

Joseph Knoche married Mary Margaret Hickey, a native of Ireland, in 1905 in Manhattan. Mary, who had come to this country in 1896 at the age of 13,  died in 1927. Joseph died in 1949 at the age of 80. 

Joseph and Mary produced two sons and two daughters, plus many grand- and great-grandchildren, a number of whom still live in and about Ridgefield. One of those grandchildren, Joe Sheehy, was a young boy in the late 1940s. One of his strongest memories of his grandfather was the hands that had handled countless rocks and built miles of walls and foundations.

“They were like sandpaper,” he said.