Julian Alden Weir, more commonly called J. Alden Weir, was one of the wonderfully diverse group of artists that get lumped together under the catch-all heading of “American Impressionists”.

Weir was a member of The Ten American Painters, a loosely tied group of painters in New York and Boston who broke away from the Society of American Artists, which was itself a splinter group from the National Academy of Design. His compatriots in the Ten included Childe Hassam, Robert Reid, Willard Metcalf, Frank Benson, Edmund Tarbell, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, and eventually, William Merrit Chase.

Most important among them for Weir was John Henry Twatchman, with whom Weir formed a long lasting friendship. The two artists painted together, often exhibited together, and were both teachers at the Art Students League in New York. Weir also taught at, and was a member of, the Cos Cob Art Colony, an artists community that sprang up around Twatchman’s home in Greenwich, CT, along with Hassam, Theodore Robinson and Robert Reid.

Members of the Cos Cob Colony were involved with the staging of the 1913 Armory Show, famous now for introducing European modernist art to America; over which Weir resigned from his presidency of the Association of Painters and Sculptors.

As a student, Weir trained at the National Academy of Design, and then in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he studied with Jean-Léon Gérôme and was friends with Jules Bastien-Lepage, who became something of a mentor.

When he returned form Europe Weir intended to make his living painting portraits, but was unsuccessful in obtaining portrait commissions for some time, so many of his portrait works from the time are of family and friends.

Weir’s style and approach changed dramatically over the course of his career, from traditional landscapes that have a feeling of Corot and Courbet and portraits influenced by Manet, to later works in which he came to adopt some of the stylistic characteristics of French Impressionism (which he at first despised), and a continuing influence from his fondness for Japanese prints.

He was also influenced by Twatchman’s tonalist aproach, possibly also the result of meeting Whistler in London before returning to the U.S. after his time in France. There was also the tonalist influence of his friendship with Albert Pinkham Ryder. Weir’s older brother, John Ferguson Weir, who I can find little info on, was also a painter, working somewhat in the tradition of the Barbizon School.

J. Alden Weir’s intimate interior scenes often put me in mind of those of Edmund Tarbell and Childe Hassam, with their muted light and tactile feeling for wood and cloth.

In his later career, Weir didn’t share his friends’ enthusiasm for traveling to paint in various locations, preferring to remain on his Connecticut farm, which is now a National Historic Site.

In his Impressionist influenced works, Weir sometimes breaks up his canvas into the short strokes of brilliant color associated with the style of Monet, Sisley and Pissarro, but just as often uses rough scumbling to achieve his broken color, giving his canvasses a fascinating textural quality.

Like a number of the other painters labeled American Impressionists, Weir didn’t feel the need to follow the lead of his French counterparts in throwing out the academic traditions of drawing and solidity of form; and his style is often a delightful blend of the two seemingly contrary artistic factions, which is one of the reasons I find Weir and the other American painters of his circle so appealing.

Today is the “Ides of March” or March 15th, the anniversary of the date in 44BC when a group of Roman senators assassinated Julius Caesar; whose lust for power had prompted him to declare himself absolute ruler for life (i.e. dictator), and thus threatened the senators’ power (more important, of course, than the welfare of the Roman citizenry, but it threatened that as well).

Personally, I think the Ides of March should be a worldwide holiday, in which power hungry leaders everywhere should be reminded to watch their step, perhaps with the circulation of images like Vincenzo Camuccini’s Death of Julius Caesar.

Camuccini was an Italian painter active in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, and was considered the foremost Italian academic painter of his time. He was a neoclassicist, like his French contemporary David, painting histories, such as the aforementioned demise of ol’ Julius, and portraits of eminent members of society.

Camuccini spent the early part of his career copying the masters, particularly Raphael. His own style, while considered more refined than original, eventually gained him popularity and made him rich enough to allow him to collect a large number of works by other artists, including Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks.

Camuccini’s Death of Julius Caesar is staged as a tableau rather than an intimate drama, but his portrayal of Caesar is reliably accurate, as it is based on an existing bust of Caesar from Caesar’s time, one of the first examples we have of direct realistic portrait sculpture of a known individual.

The death scene and Camuccini’s self-portrait are about the only paintings of his you’ll see widely reproduced, but his death scene is often used to illustrate the event, and/or mention of it in Shakespeare’s play.

Where most portraits of leaders are monuments to power, the Death of Julius Caesar is a monument to the limits and end of overreaching power, a far nobler subject in my estimation. So to all of the world’s leaders (and so-called leaders), I wish you a careful, thoughtful and warily observant Ides of March!

It’s always seemed to me that portraiture is a particularly demanding type of painting, at least the kind of portraiture in which the artist is commissioned to create the portrait, as opposed to an artist who paints someone simply because they find them an interesting subject.

Not only do you have the exacting demands of producing a likeness, which requires very careful observation and, depending on style, faithful reproduction of that likeness with careful draftsmanship and rendering; a commissioned portrait requires that the client, whether the individual themselves or someone related, be pleased with the result, which is an issue faced more often by illustrators than gallery artists.

If someone doesn’t like your landscape, they pass by in the gallery and you can sell it to someone else. A commissioned portrait has a very limited market.

Some artists thrive on the practice, though, and history’s great painters have included numerous portrait painters.

The modern practice doesn’t get as much attention as some other types of painting, but there are portraits artists who are at the top of the game and get a great deal of respect from other artists as well as their from their patrons.

Nelson Shanks is one of the latter. With a background in academic art training that he “pieced together” from various teachers and sources, both here and in Europe, Shanks has established himself not only as one one of the country’s premiere portrait painters, but also as one of the major proponents of classical realism.

Shanks, along with his wife Leona Shanks, is the founder of Studio Incamminati, an atelier style teaching program here in Philadelphia, which focuses on the principles of classical realism.

Shanks’ commissioned portraits include such notable figures as former presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Regan, Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Princess Diana, King Gustav and Queen Silvia of Sweden, Queen Julianna of the Netherlands, Luciano Pavarotti and numerous CEOs and chairmen of boards, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Times.

His web site has a few of these portraits, as well as figure paintings and a few other subjects, but the images are frustratingly small. There is a selection of larger images on the Art Renewal Center, which also has a separate article on him as a “modern master”, Nelson Shanks, Humanist Realist.

Personally, I’m more interested in his figure painting, which is superb, and his portraits of non-famous individuals, in which you can more clearly see the painter as a painter, rather than as a painter in that particular role of portrait painter of notable figures. It is here, I think, and in those rare excursion into landscape, and particularly interior scenes, where Shanks shines.