The fourteenth of sixteen children, Julian Alden Weir was born August 30, 1852, at West Point, New York, son of Robert Walter Weir and his second wife, Susan Martha Bayard Weir. From the beginning, young Julian showed an early interest in art; one that was not surprising, given that his fellow family members were engaged in the same profession. His father, a prominent painter of portraits and historical subjects, was professor of drawing at the U.S. Military Academy. His older brother, John Ferguson Weir was a well-known painter and appointed the first director of the Yale School of Fine Arts in 1869. Therefore, Julian’s family offered him encouragement in his own career as a painter, and at age seventeen, Julian enrolled first in art classes at the National Academy of Design and then, from 1873 to 1877, he studied in Europe, mainly in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He was sent off with the blessing of his father, who told Julian: “Don’t return, old boy, until your veins flow with the rich mother’s milk of Art, fatten on it, and then let your own genius ripen with the experience of it.”
