Edwin Lord Weeks Art in the Collection of Bernard Broder
Ellen K. Morris, PhD, who is currently preparing a catalogue raisonne of the artist writes about the Broder collection as follows:
Comparatively little is known or understood of Edwin Lord Weeks’ earliest works. In part, this must be because many of them fall outside the context of the works for which the artist is primarily known – finely rendered works recording his travels in North Africa, India and Persia. But the early works also remain more obscure because so many of them have been held by Weeks’ extended family and rarely come to market. This group of works is therefore all the more remarkable in its scope and breadth.
These rarely-seen early paintings demonstrate Weeks’ raw talent, and significantly contribute to our understanding of the artist’s development. Indeed, these early works make it apparent why Weeks was able to develop his mature style so rapidly. They demonstrate that he possessed substantial artistic abilities even before his training in Paris, and they document that his habit of sketching in oil, in situ, was one that he developed early in his career.
Specifically, the Florida paintings serve to explain why Weeks’ mature works largely manage to avoid the stiffness of many of his academic orientalist contemporaries. These early works demonstrate how much of Weeks’ style predated–and transcended–his formal academic education. Indeed, in documented early examples such as Florida Everglades with Great Blue Heron and Flowering Agave, Florida we see Weeks already handling foliage in the loose ‘painterly’ manner that would distinguish his work throughout his career.
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of this quantity of studies. Academic paintings are primarily known through finished works; rarely are the studies for those paintings accorded the significance they merit, and rarely are they seen in number. Yet here we have a trove of studies–the raw materials of academic painting–the architecture, landscapes, figures and animals that were typically sketched individually and brought together only in finished studio works.
Whether due to the estate sale following his untimely death, or the diligent stewardship of his extended family, Weeks’ studies are somewhat more common on the market than those of his contemporaries. But even accounting for this, the quantity and breadth of studies and preliminary works here is remarkable, ranging as they do from the earliest of his work all the way to the end of his career.
Such studies reflect an appealing immediacy, even as they demand a certain level of connoisseurship to fully appreciate. It’s easier to dismiss a study such as White-Robed Man in a Turban on a Horse as an unfinished cartoon than it is to see it as the important window into an artist’s working method that it truly is. And preliminary works like Outside the Walls, Stairway, India, and At Table, A Study highlight how fundamental the rendering of light and shadow was to Weeks’ selection of subjects and compositions.
Thus the breadth and depth of the works here affords a rare behind-the-scenes view of Weeks’ working method, from composition to rendering of detail. In that, this large group of studies adds immeasurably to our understanding of the artist’s body of work.
Information courtesy of Barridoff Galleries, October 2012.