A French Homestead

This early canvas by Julian Alden Weir is a visual homage to the Barbizon School, a group of nineteenth-century French painters who worked in a village of the same name near the Forest of Fontainebleau, on the outskirts of Paris. This style of painting, characterized by a sunlit palette of greens and browns, brushy application of paint, and pastoral depiction of nature, was absorbed by the artist while training abroad between 1873 and 1877. Weir would later embrace Impressionism, along with his fellow artist Childe Hassam, whose work is represented nearby.