Midday Rest in New England

This large Impressionist landscape and figure painting is typical of the Salon-directed work that J. Alden Weir produced in the late 1890s. Originally painted for the Carnegie Institute's annual exhibition, "Midday Rest in New England" was purchased from the Pennsylvania Academy's annual exhibition in 1898 and later exhibited at the Paris Exposition of 1900, where Weir received a bronze medal. The painting combines a wealth of carefully drawn details in the rendering of animals and human figures, along with a traditional system of linear perspective in the receding tree trunks - pictorial elements that would have appealed to academic tastes. J. Alden Weir began his career as a painter of figures and still lifes. He showed them at the Paris Salons from 1881 to 1883. It was not until the 1886 exhibition of French Impressionist work at the National Academy of Design and the American Art Association in New York, however, that Weir began to turn to landscape painting. During the summers of 1892 and 1893, he taught art classes with John Twatchman at Cos Cob, Connecticut. Between 1897 and 1901, Weir ran a summer school at his farm in Branchville, Connecticut, where this work was painted.