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.

Mahonri Young: 

The Greatest Moment

Mahonri Young, a preeminent American sculptor of the 20th Century, was a month short of his 70th birthday when perhaps his most famous work was unveiled: A tribute to his grandfather, Brigham Young, on the centennial of his arrival at what was to become Salt Lake City.

“This is the greatest moment of my life,” Young said at the 1947 unveiling of the 60-foot monument outside Salt Lake City, Utah, attended by 75,000 people.

Yet only two months earlier, his beloved wife, Dorothy, daughter of American Impressionist artist J. Alden Weir, had died.

Mahonri Mackintosh Young was born in Salt Lake City in 1877, the same year his grandfather, Mormon leader Brigham Young, died. Twenty days after his birth, the infant Mahonri received the blessing of his grandfather, who was president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and the governor of Utah territory.

Brigham Young had led the Mormons to their promised land in the Salt Lake basin, where they founded the city. As their wagon train approached the the basin, Young was lying exhausted and burning up with fever in the last wagon. As he looked down into the valley, he said, “This is the place.”

A century later, his grandson Mahonri engraved those words atop the the famous “This Is the Place Monument”  — a huge work that was created in Ridgefield.

Mahonri Young grew up in Salt Lake City where he began his art studies with J. T. Harwood, a painter. He was hired as a sketcher for the Salt Lake Tribune and by 1899 had saved enough money to move to New York and enroll in the Art Students League, where he later taught. 

In 1901 he began studies at the Academie Julian in Paris and also traveled to Italy. In Europe he

met prominent personalities in the arts including Leo Stein, brother of Gertrude, who took him to Pablo Picasso’s first exhibit in a Parisian furniture store, and Ernest Hemingway, who admired his work. He also associated with Robert Henri and the Group of Eight, leaders of the Ash Can School of American realism (Henri painted the noted portrait of Ridgefield General David Perry, also profiled in Who Was Who).

Young gained international recognition when his work was exhibited at the Salon, the official exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. 

Like his Ridgefield friend, Frederic Remington, Young was, throughout his career, an exponent of the West. Many of his paintings, etchings and sculptures dealt with Indians, cowboys, horses, and other aspects of Western life.

However, he also created works connected with industrial workers and even prizefighters. “Man with a Pick” and “Stevedore” are bronze figures now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and “Boxer” is at the Whitney Museum.

Young married Cecilia Sharp in 1907. She died ten years later of cancer. Although he had visited  artist J. Alden Weir in Ridgefield early in the 20th Century, Weir wasn’t exactly a catalyst in Young’s second marriage. “No matter how friendly Weir always was to us of the younger artists, he never introduced us to any of his three charming daughters,” Young said. “We never met any of them

until after he died. But it was no use. I married the most beautiful, the finest, the most talented of them, Dorothy.”

That was in 1931 and the next year, he moved to Weir’s farm in Ridgefield where he made his home much of the rest of his life and where he created hundreds of sketches and paintings of life at the farm, including scenes depicting animals, crops and farm laborers.

Soon after arriving Young built a studio behind the Weir homestead and next to his father-in-law’s, roomy enough to handle sizable sculptures and very bright, with large skylights. “At last I’ve got a studio large enough to do anything I want to do in paint or clay,” he said when it was finished. “If I ever have a big thing to do again, I will do it here even if I have to stay the whole winter.” The Young studio has been restored as part of the Weir Farm National Historic Site.

In 1939, he received the commission to create the big, centennial monument to his grandfather that would not be unveiled until eight years later. Most of the work on “This Is the Place” was done

in his Ridgefield studio.

In 1950, Young also created the sculpture that represents the state of Utah in the National Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol in Washington: It is a rendering of his grandfather.

Young’s works are also in the collections of many major museums, including the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Harvard Art Museum.

Skilled at painting, drawing, etching and sculpture, Young taught almost every subject in the curriculum at the Art Students League, said Dr. Thomas E. Toone, author of the 1997 biography, “Mahonri Young: His Life and Art.” 

Both this and 1999 biography, “A Song of Joys: The Biography of Mahonri Mackintosh Young, Sculptor, Painter, Etcher,” by Norma S. Davis, point out that despite his ancestry and upbringing, Young was not a participating member of Mormon church. “He liked cigars and wine and he found it humorous when he had to go to church twice in one day,” said Dr. Todd A. Britsch, a Brigham Young University reviewer of both books. Nonetheless, he was devoted “to his Mormon heritage and friends.”

Young died in 1957 at the age of 80 and is buried in Salt Lake City.