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.”

Sperry and Doris Andrews: 

Artists with A Sense of History

Sperry Andrews was the third noted artist to own the old Beers farmhouse at the corner of Nod Hill Road and Pelham Lane. He and his artist wife, Doris, decided that their home should become a memorial to the two preceding owners. 

Today thousands visit the result: Weir Farm National Historic Site.

“The Andrewses recognized their farm as a place of extraordinary significance to American art and were instrumental in preserving its landscape and artistic legacy for future generations of artists,” the National Park Service said.

Charles Sperry Andrews III was born in 1917 in Manhattan (his banker father, Charles Sperry Andrews II,  and his grandfather were from Danbury and he could trace  his roots hereabouts back more than 200 years). When he was three, the family moved to Bronxville, N.Y., where his father had become president of a new bank.

Andrews attended both public and private schools, and knew from a very young age that he wanted to be an artist. He began sketching seriously at eight years old. He eventually studied at the

National Academy of Design in New York and later at the Art Students League, also in New York.

During World War II, Andrews served in the First Army Division from 1941 to 1945,   in Iceland, France, Belgium, and Germany. He was in charge of munitions, and took part in the second wave of the invasion of the beaches at Normandy.

It was at Art Students League that he met fellow student Doris Bass, who became his wife for 55 years. A native of Louisville, Ky., she was born in 1920 — a great-granddaughter of William Kelly, who invented the pneumatic process of refining steel. She graduated from the Erskine School in Boston and served in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as a Morse code telegraph operator during World War II. After the war she moved to New York City to study art.

 The couple had three children. In 1948 they moved to Ridgefield, living in the old “Book Barn,” which had been a bookstore and tearoom in the 1930s, on Route 33 right on the Wilton line.

They lived there nearly 10 years, painting, raising their children, and summering on Block Island — one of the artist’s favorite subjects for his pictures. 

Soon after he moved here, Andrews learned that Mahonri Mackintosh Young, the noted American sculptor and son-in-law of American Impressionist Julian Alden Weir, lived in Ridgefield. As a new artist in town, Andrews knocked on the old artist’s door — “the door of the farmhouse the late Mr. Weir had acquired in 1882 and made a country retreat for a wide circle of turn-of-the-century artist friends, including Albert Pinkham Ryder, Childe Hassam, John Twachtman, and John Singer Sargent,” wrote Macklin Reid in Andrews’s obituary. “It was an artistic legacy that Mr. Andrews grew to deeply appreciate, first as a friend of Mr. Young, later as an owner and, eventually, as artist-in-residence at The Weir Farm.”

The Andrewses became close friends with Young (also profiled in Who Was Who). When Young died in 1957, they bought the main Weir farmhouse and surrounding property.  They also became friends with Cora Weir Burlingham, a daughter of J. Alden Weir, who donated substantial portions of her nearby property to Nature Conservancy as the Weir Preserve.

During their 50 years in the house, “they never altered any of the original architectural footprints or interior details of the various structures on the site,” said Julie Trachtenberg, a former Weir Farm researcher.

In the late 1970’s, as the property in the area began to be developed for subdivisions, the couple started a grassroots effort to preserve the farm for future enjoyment by the public and by artists. “Both Sperry and Doris Andrews devoted tremendous amounts of time and energy to preserving the property and ensuring that others recognized its importance in the history of art in America,” Reid wrote.

They enlisted the support of The Nature Conservancy, The Trust for Public Land, the State of Connecticut, and various politicians, including U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman. Finally in 1990, Congress voted to create Weir Farm National Historic Site, the only national park property in the country that celebrates American painting. 

While the Weir Farm was sold to the federal government, the couple retained life use of the main farmhouse and they continued to live and paint there until they died.

 Sperry Andrews was an accomplished and well recognized artist whose specialty was plein air landscapes. He was remembered locally in the 1950s and 60s for his mobile studio — an old Willys Jeep with all but the driver’s seat removed. 

He “paints year round out-of-doors,” New Britain Museum of American Art Director Charles Ferguson wrote in 1983. “His paintings are completed on the spot, not the usual ‘sketch from the field, redo it in the studio’ scheme.”

“That is undoubtedly why Sperry Andrews’ paintings and drawings have such freshness and harmony of light, color and line. One may find traces of Cubism and the Orient in his work but he has developed a blend which is uniquely all his own.”

New York Times art critic Vivien Raynor once observed that he “paints the Connecticut countryside, but with considerably more panache than Weir… Though he uses richer color and seldom if ever includes figures, Mr. Andrews often recalls Fairfield Porter in the suppleness of his Impressionistic brushwork and in his intimations of a life lived in comfortable middle class surroundings.”

Andrews worked primarily in oil, watercolor, charcoal, and pencil and over his long life, produced more than 10,000 works.

His art is in the permanent collection of the New Britain Museum as well as at the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Columbus Gallery of Fine Art, and the National Academy of Design.

He won many art awards and prizes and was elected a member of the Century Association in 1993 and made an academician of the National Academy of Design in 1994. He taught at the Wooster Community Arts Center in Danbury and at the Silvermine College of the Art  in New Canaan.

Andrews was 87 when he died in 2005, and is buried in Wilton’s Hillside Cemetery. Doris had died two years earlier at the age of 82.

“His vision of a singularly beautiful world inspired all those who knew him,” said his

daughter, Catherine Barrett Andrews. “He was unfailingly gracious and polite in his approach to people, and to life itself.”

However, Catherine Andrews pointed out in 2003, her mother was also “a brilliant watercolorist. She really gave up her art work for him, when they got married and started a family.” 

Catherine recalled that “at one point my father and a bunch of their artist friends were sitting around and my brother, Sperry, produced a number of her early works, watercolors, and everyone present was just amazed at how beautiful they were. There was just this stunned silence. 

“And my father said, ‘Oh, my God, I should have given up my life for hers.’ ”