Artist. He was one of the three founding members of "The Ten", a loosely allied group of American artists dissatisfied with professional art organizations, who banded together in 1898 to exhibit their works as a stylistically unified group for over 20 years. He was born and raised in West Point, New York. His father was painter Robert Walter Weir, a professor of drawing at the Military Academy at West Point. His older brother, John Ferguson Weir, also was a well-known landscape artist. He received his first art training at the National Academy of Design in the early 1870s. He initially painted portraits, figurative works, and still life works in an established academic style. He spent four years in Europe studying art, beginning in 1873 at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He then traveled to rural France, Spain, Holland, and England, and in Paris he spent afternoons at the Louvre museum. He continued his art studies with Jean-Léon Gérôme, who was considered a master. He received the top award in Gerome's studio, and also exhibited at the Paris Salon. In 1877 he encountered impressionism for the first time, a style which he initially disliked intensely. He returned to New York City, and became a charter member of the Society of American Artists. He exhibited his work at the National Academy of Design, where he had first displayed his paintings in 1875. His income at this time came from portrait commissions and teaching art classes at art schools and in private classes. He banded with other artists in a group they called The Tile Club, which included William Merritt Chase and Winslow Homer. Deciding he needed a change of scenery, he purchased a 153-acre farm in Branchville, Connecticut for a painting and ten dollars. Anna Dwight Baker attended one of his private classes in January 1882. The two were engaged within three weeks, and married the following year. The couple's honeymoon took them to Europe for six months, then they returned in September of 1883 to the Branchville farm, where he and Anna raised their three daughters. During the 1880s and early 1890s, he experimented with etching and developed a new approach to landscape painting. He focused on the inspirational nature of the landscape at his Branchville farm and elsewhere in New England. He exhibited his new style of painting with Society of Painters in Pastels, the New York Etching Club, and the Universal Exposition in Paris, where he receiving a silver medal. By 1891 he had completely adopted impressionism. His one-man show at the Blakeslee gallery in the same year displayed his affinity for the Impressionist style, demonstrating a tendency for a lighter palette of pastel colors and broken brushwork. In 1892, Anna died from complications from giving birth to their daughter Cora. He left Branchville and spent several months in Chicago where he painted a mural for the World's Columbian Exposition. Anna's sister, Ella, took charge of the baby and her two older sisters while he was away. He and Ella grew close over this time, and they were married in Boston in October of 1893. During that year, the American Art Association held an exhibit with some of his pieces, along with others by Claude Monet and Paul Besnard. He helped raise money for those who lost their jobs in the 1893 depression with painting exhibitions. In late 1897, he became a member of the Ten American Painters, generally known as "The Ten," a group of painters who left the Society of American Artists to protest what they saw as the overemphasis on Classical and Romantic Realism over Impressionism. This group provided an alternative to the exhibitions of the National Academy of Design and the Society of American Artists. During the remainder of his life, he painted impressionist landscapes and figurative works. His paintings done after 1900 showed a renewed interest of the academicism prevalent in the work of his younger days, with subjects treated less realistically and a greater emphasis placed on drawing and design. In 1912 he was selected the first president of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. He and many of his friends exhibited in Armory Show of 1913, an international show of more than three hundred artists that had an attendance of more than a hundred thousand people. In 1915, he was elected President of the National Academy of Design and granted membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, and the Board of Directors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was appointed to the National Commission on Fine Arts in 1916 and received honorary degrees from Princeton and Yale universities. He was a member of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts from 1916 until his death. His most critically acclaimed painting is "The Red Bridge" from 1895. It is a technical masterpiece, displaying a truss bridge that spanned the Shetucket River down the street from his Windham farm. Today his paintings are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Phillips Collection, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Brigham Young University's Museum of Art, the Portland Art Museum, and the Wadsworth Atheneum.