Julian Alden Weir : “The Factory Village” (1897)

The American artist Julian Alden Weir was a reluctant convert to Impressionism. On first encountering the style while studying in Europe, he wrote: “I never in my life saw more horrible things…They do not observe drawing nor form but give you an impression of what they call nature. It was worse than a Chamber of Horrors.” By 1891 he had adopted the style as his own, but nonetheless approached it in a distinctly conservative spirit of which The Factory Village is illustrative.

An idyllic view of Willimantic, Connecticut, and the facilities of the Willimantic Linen Company, the Metropolitan Museum of Art describes it as a celebration of “picturesque New England industry, offering symbols of progress in harmony with nature,” while containing “no hint of the company’s labor woes or financial problems.” Weir himself lacked the temperament for busy environments, having previously quit New York City for a farm in Ridgefield, Connecticut. “Life on the street could often frustrate and aggravate,” wrote art historian Hollis Clayson, “but contemplated from far off, experienced exclusively as a visual phenomenon, it could satisfy.”