Original works of art

The son of Robert Walker Weir, a professor of drawing at the United States Military Academy at West Point New York, Weir studied at the National Academy of Design in New York, as well as at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris for four years, where he studied under the great painter, Jean-Leon Gerome. When he returned to New York, he established a studio in Greenwich Village where he painted portraits and gave painting lessons.

Weir spent his time between his home in Manhattan, and his farm in Branchville, Connecticut, which became a center for a number of artists who were painting in a new style of art which was to become known as American Impressionism, a new style of painting related to French Impressionism.

Weir had assisted in the founding of the Society of American Artists in 1877, but he was also one of the ten artists who resigned from it in 1898. He was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1885, became the first president of the Association of American painters and Sculptors in 1912, and was elected to the Presidency of The National Academy of Design in 1915.

While Weir did not specialize in dog painting, he owned several dogs which he included in his compositions. In addition to a painting of a bloodhound and a French Bulldog in the AKC Museum, he painted “Dogs” in 1898, “Hunting the Coons” in 1905 and “Hunter and Dogs” in 1912.