JULIAN ALDEN WEIR 1852-1919
The Oldest Inhabitant, 1876
Oil on canvas, 65 1/2 X 32" (166.37 x 81.28 cm.)
Signed, upper left
Museum purchase, 922-0-105

J. Alden Weir is best remembered as a leading s American Impressionist, but he did not always embrace this progressive style. "They do not observe drawing nor form but give you an impression of what they call nature," he wrote to his parents after viewing the French Impressionist exhibition in Paris. "It was worse than the Chamber of Horrors." 1 Weir's reaction is a reflection of his training from 1873 to 1877 at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Jean-L6on G6r6me, who emphasized the careful observation of detail, precise drawing, and high finish that was challenged by the Impressionists.
The Oldest Inhabitant typifies the oeuvre of Weir's student years and reveals his involvement with the European artists working in France. Weir had spent the summer of 1874 in Brittany, where he met Robert Wylie, a painter of peasant life, whose dark, rich palette and love of local French costumes and customs is reflected in The Oldest Inhabitant. During 1874, Weir became friendly with students of Jules Bastien-Lepage, whose scenes of French peasant life are rendered with exacting detail. That summer, Weir decided to paint in Cernay-la-Ville, a village southwest of Paris, where he knew his companions would be French painters, stating, "I know I will learn more and be more serious if I remain with the Frenchmen."
The Oldest Inhabitant, the largest painting of his student years, resulted from this summer's work, although it took him another year to complete it. Weir began the painting by September 10, 1875, but was still working on it the following July 5, when he wrote home from Cernay-la-Ville: "Yesterday was the glorious 'Fourth.' I celebrated in a quiet way by leaving Paris on the 8 A.M. train.... I have brought my large canvas with me, which I expect to finish for the ex [hibition] of the end of the year ... the old peasant is in good health ... I lost little time and all goes well . . . . " Weir's sojourn at Cernay-la-Ville ended dramatically when he was unexpectedly summoned back to Paris to take an examination at the Ecole. Riding the stage coach to the train station, he remembered he had left The Oldest Inhabitant behind. "I got out to run back, being assured that I would never catch the train ... [but] everything counted on my canvas." When he reached the hotel he ordered the best horse in town and galloped off, canvas in hand. He rode on to the next stage stop, where it was market day, and, "[i] the most dangerous part ... my horse balked at something, and walked all through the butter and egg pots. The peasants were bawling at me at the top of their lungs.116 There Weir was able to join his fellow travelers, who applauded his great effort.
In The Oldest Inhabitant the importance of the model's advanced age is underscored by the inscription Weir painted as though carved into the wood of the cabinet: "July 4th 1876/La plus Vielle de Cernay/n6e le 4 Juin/1794." The date, July 4, 1876, cannot refer simply to the painting's completion or of the model's death because she continued to pose for him. This eighty-two -year- old woman's life had spanned a tumultuous period of her nation's history, reaching back to the French Revolutionary War. Weir may have also been marking the passage of time in America. Independence Day was a special holiday for the painter, who was raised at West Point, and who, a year earlier, had written warmly of the festivities that marked the holiday there. Of course, Weir's elderly subject, with a wrinkled visage reflecting character and implying wisdom, also draws on a strong artistic tradition that stretches back to seventeenth- century paintings by Rembrandt van Rijn, whom Weir greatly admired.
Though Weir wished to remain in France, in the spring of 1877 he submitted The Oldest Inhabitant for exhibition at the National Academy of Design in anticipation of his return home that October. The work received favorable placement and was hailed by one Critic as an "admirable performance, coming near truly great." Peasant subjects continued to appear in Weir's work, largely because of his frequent foreign travel, but in the late 1880s, he turned decisively to painting scenes of contemporary American life in a style that increasingly found its inspiration in Impressionism.

DOREEN BOLGER