The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 37, no. 4

JULIAN ALDEN WEIR Anna Dwight Weir Reading a Letter, about 1890
WILL H. BRADLEY Thanksgiving, 1895
Weir's tender watercolor of his first wife
echoes many of his interests before 1890.
Trained at the Ecole de Beaux-Arts, Weir
applied the precision of the academic
tradition with special grace to his portraits
of women and children. His affection for
still-lifes and watercolors is reflected in the
flowers and landscape sketch, while his
on dark and light values rather than strong
color. This taste, as well as the informal
mood and geometric organization, could
have been influenced by the portraits of
Degas, Whistler, and especially Manet. A
year or two after this watercolor was
begun, Weir turned wholeheartedly to
Impressionism, and perhaps this change in
finishing it.
Bradley's bold colors and curvilinear
masses and lines, as in this poster for the
Chap Book, helped to popularize posters in
America. His art nouveau style owed
much to the English artists Aubrey
Beardsley and Charles Ricketts, here especially
in the depiction of the heads, and