Edwin Lord Weeks

Edwin Lord Weeks (1849-1903) was one of the most prominent American Orientalist painters of his time, whose ambitious canvases documenting the peoples, architecture, and landscapes of North Africa, Persia, and India secured him substantial recognition on both sides of the Atlantic. Weeks undertook extensive periodic journeys throughout the regions he painted in order to gather the subject matter, architectural details, and atmospheric backgrounds for his compositions. According to his personal letters, Weeks traveled to India in 1883, where he painted scenes from Mathura, Benares, Agra, Delhi, Amritsar, Bombay, and Ahmedabad. It was these paintings of Indian subjects that established Weeks's reputation as a Salon medalist, and his sensitive renderings of Indian life brought him particular celebrity in both France and the United States. His mature pictures demonstrate a distinct mastery of ornamental detail, local architectural elements, and the human figure caught in the specific character of place.

Weeks was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of well-to-do tea and spice merchants in Newton, Massachusetts. The family's prosperity placed the younger Weeks in a position to indulge his personal love for travel and for artistic pursuits, an unusual freedom that would prove essential to the direction of his mature career. He first traveled to the Florida Keys with the express purpose of drawing, and he then journeyed further on to South America. His earliest surviving works date from 1867.

In 1870 Weeks opened a studio in his hometown of Newton and in the same year made his first trip to Egypt, the Holy Land, and Damascus in Syria. He continued on to Morocco in North Africa before returning home, where he exhibited his paintings at the Boston Art Club. In 1874 he returned to Paris, where he studied under Léon Bonnat at the École des Beaux-Arts and became acquainted with the great academic Orientalist Jean-Léon Gérôme. This distinguished French training combined with Weeks's direct firsthand observation of the regions he painted gave his mature canvases their unusual combination of academic polish and ethnographic authority.

Weeks traveled extensively throughout North Africa and the Near East, chronicling his journeys in letters and in drawings. His paintings of India, Morocco, and Persia brought him great renown and celebrity back in France and the Americas. He continued to paint right up to his untimely death in 1903 from an illness he contracted during his final travels in India.