NEW YORK CITY – Vance Jordon, owner of Vance Jordon Find Art Inc, has announced the gallery’s fall exhibition featuring paintings by Edwin Lord Weeks (1849-1903), the prominent late Nineteenth Century American Orientalist painter.
Entitled “Edwin Lord Weeks: Visions of India,” the show will be at the gallery, 958 Madison Avenue, through December 12, and include approximately 25 oil paintings, mostly scenes of India that the artist encountered first-hand.
Included are major works loaned from private collections and public institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Syracuse University Art Collection, the Berkshire Museum and the Portland Library.
Edwin Lord Weeks, the scion of an old New England family, was born in Boston, Mass. He arrived in Paris as a young man in the 1870s to train at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Jean-Léon Gérôme and privately with Léon Bonnat. In France, Weeks became part of an increasingly noteworthy colony of American expatriate artists and, in competition with natives and foreigners alike, eventually became one of the city’s most celebrated Salonniers.
Weeks’ initial success was founded on his paintings of the Middle East and, in particular, of North Africa where he distinguished himself by accessing regions of Morocco previously closed to Western travelers.
Audiences and critics appreciated the first-hand authenticity of his work and eagerly anticipated the exhibition of each new composition. Parisian art dealer M. Durand-Ruel, famous for his patronage of the French Impressionists, was among those interested in Weeks’ distinctive and extremely popular creations, arranging at one point to buy all of the artist’s painted output.
Weeks undertook his first voyage to India in 1882, opening a field that had been virtually ignored by contemporary painters. Weeks presence in India in the 1880s and 1890s coincided with the height of the British Raj, and it remains both a curiosity and a suggestion of Yankee spirit that it was an American painter who best expressed the romance and splendor of Indian civilization. This fact was duly recognized when Weeks was invited to exhibit a large collection of his works at the Empire of India Exhibition held in London in 1895.
For information, 212-570-9500.
