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Edwin Lord Weeks, painter and explorer

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2002 by Ulrich W. Hiesinger

Edwin Lord Weeks occupied a unique position among American painters, even by the standards of those who, like him, dedicated their careers to orientalism as a subject. The scion of an old New England family he left his native Boston for Paris as a student and stayed to become one of the city's most respected exhibitors at the Salons. No other American artist combined as he did a large and exceptional pictorial output with an extensive body of equally fascinating travel writing that captured the imaginations of viewers and readers on both sides of the Atlantic.

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Having apparently made painting a full-time occupation in 1870, Weeks first went abroad in 1872 and spent the next several years traveling back and forth from the United States to Paris and the Near East. (1) In Paris he appears to have studied initially at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Jean Leon Gerome (1824-1904), but his most important teacher was Leon Bonnat (1833-1922), who instilled in him the dual principles of absolute realism and love of color. Another American pupil of Bonnat's recalled:

At Bonnat's stern realism was the law. A view of the output of crude torsos, legs, feet and heads suggested a butcher's shop. No one did a thing without the model. It was pure still life...anyone who attempted to temporize with the commonplace ugliness of things was looked at with pity. (2)

The phrase "pure still life" could equally be applied to Weeks's mature realistic style. In his use of color Weeks was one of the few American painters to profit from the recent experiments of the Spanish-Roman school, and he did so in part through Bonnat's example. As Weeks always took pains to point out, Bonnat was a Basque by birth and Spanish by training, having studied in Madrid under Federico de Madrazo y Kuntz (18 15-1894). Weeks saw Bonnat as a Spanish painter, placing him within a European schcool noted for its experimental use of brilliant colors. The charismatic leader of this school was Mariano Fortuny y Marsal (1838-1874), a painter renowned for his audacious colors and dashing brushwork, who became even more famous after his untimely death. Weeks probably did not know Fortuny personally but he must have felt his influence nonetheless. In fact, sometime before 1881, Weeks not only worked in Granada in the studio that Fortuny had occupied in his last years, but also employed Fortuny's former model s. (3) The early enthusiasm that Weeks showed for painting in Spain and Morocco was itself consistent with Fortuny's example. Priding himself on his use of color, Weeks described himself as a "colorist" not an "orientalist," choosing to define his work in terms of its artistic treatment rather than its subject matter.

Weeks's early reputation as a painter was based on several daring journeys he made to record Muslim culture in parts of Morocco where few, if any, foreigners ventured--an audacity heightened by his determination to bring along his attractive young wife, Frances Rollins Hale, known as Fanny In 1878, when Weeks and his wife traveled to Rabat and the neighboring city of Shela (now Sale) on the coast, he called it "the most notable campaign in a hostile country that I have indulged in as yet," and underscored its dangers by declaring: "We got out of it by the skin of our teeth." (4) On landing at Rabat, Weeks, his wife, and a traveling companion, the Scottish painter Robert Gavin (1827-1883), were immediately surrounded by a sinister mob, astonished to find westerners in their midst. Escorted by soldiers, the group carried on, but Weeks later wrote:

Evidently they were not pleased to see us. Upon entering [Shela], which is the Mecca of the Moors, although we had a soldier to precede us, we were actually pursued by a mob, who finally gave us a shower of stones. (5)

The visitors also had to contend with a famine in the region. However, this seemed to have worked in the artist's favor, thanks to his willingness to distribute a modest largesse--what he called his "interested charity." This allowed him to obtain models who, in normal times, would have shunned close contact with westerners. He wrote:

There are magnificent types here, grand looking old men...Arab girls with faces like African madonnas and such lustrous eyes; strange types from far off provinces such as Gerome has never rendered. (6)

He was similarly fascinated by the unexplored landscape of Shela with its ruined Roman baths and Arab gateway, and likewise savored the fact that no one had painted these things before.

When preparing to leave Rabat in February 1879, Weeks contracted typhoid fever, which left him gravely ill for a month. His wife was also stricken and nearly died. Both owed their survival to Gavin, who faithfully nursed them. The group finally all but crawled out of the city to face a stormy trip home.

According to his friend the minister and author Alexander S. Twombly (1832-1907), this harrowing but productive journey to Rabat in 1878 and 1879 marked the beginning of Weeks's maturity as an artist. Twombly wrote: "Anyone who has seen the fruits of those six months down on the coast of Morocco will testify that Weeks won his golden spurs then and there." (7) The artist's notable success in Paris over the next few years proved the accuracy of these words.

Edwin Lord Weeks, painter and explorer

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2002 by Ulrich W. Hiesinger

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