Julian Alden Weir (1852–1919)

JULIAN ALDEN WEIR (1852–1919)
A Day in June, about 1903–06
Oil on canvas, 24 x 32 3/8 in.
Signed (at lower left): J. Alden Weir

RECORDED: “Gallery Notes,” The Sun (New York), January 10, 1907, p. 8 //Julian Alden Weir: An Appreciation of His life And Works (New York: The Century Club, 1921), p, 134 as “June” in “List of Works,” prepared by Dorothy Weir, dated 1900–1909 // Doreen Bolger Burke, J. Alden Weir: An American Impressionist (Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 1983), pp. 229, 231 fig. 6.2 illus., 305

EXHIBITED: Montross Gallery, New York, January 2–15, 1907, Exhibition of Pictures by J. Alden Weir, no. 1 // The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March 17–April 20, 1924, Julien Alden Weir Memorial Exhibition, no. 46, p. 7 as “June,” lent by Paul Schulze

EX COLL.: Paul Schulze, Sr. (1864–1948), Chicago, by 1921; to The Art Institute of Chicago, 1941; to sale, Sotheby’s, New York, June 2, 2016, no. 87; to private collection, until the present

A Day in June was painted by Weir between 1903 and 1906. (Weir scholar Doreen Bolger Burke dates it 1903; Weir exhibited it at Montross Galleries in January 1907.) Burke notes that, after 1900, Weir’s “approach to ... [impressionism], ... confident and unchallenged, became more lyrical.” This was Weir’s “period of greatest success and recognition.... During these last years of his career, landscape was unquestionably his principal mode of expression” (Burke, p. 229). The January 1907 solo show at Montross Gallery with twenty-four oil paintings and more than twice as many etchings was a critical success. The art critic for The Sun, likely James Huneker, singled out A Day in June for special notice, describing with approval “its soft summer sky, through which lazily float dim white cloud hummocks (January 10, 1907, p. 8).” The scene is doubtless set in Connecticut. It may have been inspired by Weir’s own farm at Branchville, or at the Baker property in Windham, Connecticut, his wife’s family property that the couple inherited in 1899. Weir divided his time between his home and studio in New York City and the two Connecticut farms. The family habit was to spend the early part of moderating weather in Branchville and then move farther north and east to Windham later, before returning to New York for winter in the studio. In A Day in June, Weir, a confident artist at the peak of his career, summons the ease and grace of an early summer day, with a gentle palette that evokes the promise of a season to come of restorative leisure. 

Paul Schulze owned A Day in June by 1921, when he lent it to a retrospective exhibition of Weir’s work at New York’s Century Club. Schulze was a German immigrant to the Midwest who began his American career as a baker and built his Chicago-based business into one of the largest commercial bread bakeries in the country. Schulze was a public-spirited collector and patron of the arts. In 1913, he commissioned a major Chicago architect, John Ahlschlager, to design a five-story Art Deco bakery and warehouse on the south side of Chicago. The building, with a decorated terra-cotta façade, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 and is currently being repurposed as a data technology center. Schulze’s obituary in The New York Times (August 15, 1948) lists him as a trustee of Concordia Teachers College in River Forest, Illinois (now Concordia University Chicago), as well as a member of the Chicago Museum of Natural History, the Municipal Art League of Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Galleries Association, and the Chicago and Illinois Historical Societies. Schulze was also a private art collector. In 1924, he donated fifteen American paintings to the Art Institute of Chicago to be displayed together as the Walter H. Schulze Gallery of American Art. The gift memorialized Schulze’s son, West Point graduate Captain Walter H. Schulze, a pilot whose plane crashed at the very end of World War I. A Day in June was not part of the original gift but remained with Schulze until he donated it to the Art Institute in 1941. The museum deaccessioned the picture in 2016 and sent it to auction where it was acquired by the present owner.