Edwin Lord Weeks

George and Isabel Thacher née Gourlie, Boston (acquired circa 1874)
Hamilton and Elizabeth Thacher née McBain, Montana (gifted from the above, his parents, on the occasion of their wedding in 1909)
Thence by descent to the present owners

One often thinks of Edwin Lord Weeks’ familiar persona as adventurer-traveler-painter as characterizing only his mature oeuvre of the 1880s and 1890s, but more recently it has become known that his ambitions as artist-explorer started as soon as he committed himself to full-time painting at the age of 23 in 1872. From 1872 through 1876, Weeks was driven to the Near East to sketch, particularly to Egypt, where he produced numerous studies on which he based full-fledged oil paintings once he arrived back in his Newtonville studio, outside Boston. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 encouraged Weeks to concentrate on Egypt. Through these years, his oeuvre was prodigious and he assiduously exhibited and successfully sold his work at the Boston Art Club and the Eliot, Blakeslee & Noyes Gallery, one of Boston’s leading commercial art dealers.

Weeks’ earliest reputation appeared to blossom in the fall of 1873, when he had his first impact on the Boston art scene with work generated from his travels to the Near East and Egypt earlier that year. But by Spring 1874 Weeks’ peripatetic travels to Egypt to sketch and his subsequent return to his studio to enlarge his sketches into paintings earned him his first critically-recognized debut with an exhibition held at the Boston Art Club. There, one of the star paintings inspired by Weeks’ Egyptian travels was titled “A View on the Nile near Cairo”–most certainly the present painting, given its size, scope and presence, and its conformity with a press review it inspired in the Boston Daily Evening Transcript (May 9, 1874, p. 6), which noted:
“E. L. Weeks has never done better work... [A] canvas by this artist is a view on the river Nile near Cairo, and its breadth of treatment and luminous color are exceedingly marked, while its qualities if atmosphere are decidedly the best he has ever given us.”

What words could better allude to the qualities of the present painting. “Atmosphere,” “brightness,” and “luminous color” are all epithets attributable to this painting of a broad desert river where it collides with the azure noonday sky–the citron, pink and mauve streamlets within the river melded into each other with the most subtly-blended brushwork; a pink atmospheric horizon of sky melting into indigo at the upper regions. Finally, the Nile iconography of ancient temples, mosques and minarets set upon an island occupies the midline of the composition, separating river from sky, behind which is a glimpse of the cliffs of the east bank towering above on the opposite shore. The Daily Evening Transcript again commented on these characteristics in Weeks’ paintings later in 1874, when the artist exhibited another group of works at Eliot, Blakeslee & Noyes, where it was noted they were:
“mostly studies in the East, painted with great brilliance of color and fine effects of sunlight.” (Nov. 12, 1874, p. 1)

Against the pervasive sky overhead and luminous sweep of the river Nile, Weeks sets into play a great dhow at shore, the hard, brown tones of the sharp forms and elements occupying the left half of the composition; heavy earthen berms and walls built up on the west bank of the Nile, and a grove of deep green Egyptian palms anchoring the coastal walls and shrubbery to the tall skies overhead. All are iconic elements of the Nile; all bespeak exotic Egypt to eye of the western traveler-painter and his audience. And as is borne out in this ambitious work by Weeks, the artist’s enduring practice of painting figures strewn in quotidian positions upon the landscape began very early in his artistic practice. Whereas the figures here are, not surprisingly, rather stiffly drawn and painted in a work as early as1874, yet work well together from a distance, it is important to bear in mind that Weeks’ development as a suave figure painter ensues merely after a year and a half later under the tutelage of Gérôme and Bonnat in 1874-76. A sea change in Weeks’ renderings of the human figure occurs in his work thereafter.

The key principles of light, color and composition evidenced in this present youthful but highly successful painting of the Nile conjoined to form a hard-edged realism characteristic of the artist’s later work, and was within two years to be put to continual use in settings as diverse as Spain and especially Morocco, the latter serving as the inspiration for Weeks’ output for the remainder of the 1870s. Just four years after the Nile painting, Weeks’ reputation at home was sewn up and, in February 1878, he auctioned 46 paintings of Morocco, Egypt, Palestine and Spain. The catalogue introduction to the exhibition of the works lionized Weeks at the mere age of 29:
“As a student of Eastern life, with its rich color and unique effects, Mr. Weeks stands entirely alone among our Boston artists; having marked out for himself a bold path in which he has scarcely a rival in this country.”