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Edwin Lord Weeks (1849-1903)

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Edwin Lord Weeks è stato un pittore statunitense.
Fu discepolo di Léon Bonnat e di Jean-Léon Gérôme, che era diventato in America il più importante pittore del genere Orientalista-Nord Africano. I genitori di Weeks erano mercanti di spezie molto influenti e risiedevano a Newton, un sobborgo di Boston; grazie allo stato sociale familiare il giovane Edwin poté dedicarsi alla pittura ed ai viaggi, i suoi principali interessi.
Nel 1870 soggiornò a Parigi e studiò alla École des Beaux-Art con Léon Bonnat e di Jean-Léon Gérome.



Dopo un periodo vissuto in Marocco tra il 1873-1880, si stabilì a Parigi e vi aprì il suo studio. Continuò a fare numerosi viaggi nel Medio Oriente, dipingendo e facendo numerose fotografie.
La narrazione di uno dei suoi viaggi con illustrazioni da lui eseguite apparve a puntate su Harper's and Scribner's tra il 1893-1895.
Viaggiò anche in Turchia, Persia e India e, come risultato, pubblicò nel 1896 un resocondo del viaggio intitolato From the Black Sea through Persia and India.
Weeks fu insignito della Legion d'Onore francese e dell'Ordine di San Michele tedesco.













Edwin Lord Weeks was born at Boston, Massachusetts. He was a pupil of Léon Bonnat and of Jean-Léon Gérôme, at Paris.
He made many voyages to the East, and was distinguished as a painter of oriental scenes. Weeks' parents were affluent spice and tea merchants from Newton, a suburb of Boston and as such they were able to accept, probably encourage, and certainly finance their son's youthful interest in painting and travelling.
As a young man Edwin Lord Weeks visited the Florida Keys to draw and also travelled to Surinam in South America.
His earliest known paintings date from 1867 when Edwin Lord Weeks was eighteen years old, although it is not until his Landscape with Blue Heron, dated 1871 and painted in the Everglades, that Edwin Lord Weeks started to exhibit a dexterity of technique and eye for composition - presumably having taken professional tuition. In 1895 he wrote and illustrated a book of travels, From the Black Sea through Persia and India, and two years later he published Episodes of Mountaineering.
He died in November 1903.
He was a member of the Légion d'Honneur, France, an officer of the Order of St. Michael, Germany, and a member of the Secession, Munich.