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Measures: Sight: 7”x11”. Overall 13.5x17.5”.
Partial AskArt Bio: Homer Dodge Martin (1836-1897): Martin was born in 1836 in Albany, New York and as a young man worked as a carpenter and architect. In 1852, he turned to painting, having been encouraged by sculptor Erastus Dow Palmer. Ten years later he moved to New York City, where he lived for thirty years. After moving to New York, he began to paint areas in the upstate New York area including the Hudson River Valley, although it is believed that the Adirondacks provided Martin his favorite venue for sketching. He studied the Hudson River landscapes of John Frederick Kensett, and made friends with John La Farge, who was known for his landscapes and still lifes.
Partial AskArt Bio: Robert Walter Weir 1803-1889: Settling in New York, Weir opened a studio and was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1829. As Professor of Drawing at the United States Military Academy beginning in 1834, his students included Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Seth Eastman and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. His 1836 mural in the West Point chapel, Peace and War, may have helped secure the artist’s commission to paint a large mural for one of the four blank panels in the Capitol rotunda. That work, Embarkation of the Pilgrims, was completed in the summer of 1843 and installed in the Capitol in December of that year. From 1843 to 1876, Weir was active as a painter of landscape art in the Hudson River style (Church of the Holy Innocents, Highland Falls, West Point); as a portraitist (Robert E. Lee and General Winfield Scott); as a history painter (Landing of Henry Hudson); and as a genre painter (St. Nicholas, the prototype for much of the subsequent Santa Claus iconography). The father of the artists John Ferguson Weir and Julian Alden Weir, he suffered a severe illness in 1866, slowing the pace of his career.
Estimate: $2,000-$4,000.
