Edwin Lord Weeks
American Academic Classical Artist
1849 - 1903

Painting - Along the Ghats Mathura.
Edwin Lord Weeks is one of the most celebrated of the American Orientalist, this certainly being so during his lifetime, and although quite a lot is recorded concerning his professional career and travels, much of this from his own extensive travel writings, relatively little is known about his private life.
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 traveling. As a young man he visited the Florida Keys to draw and also traveled to Surinam in South America. His earliest known paintings date from 1867 when he was eighteen years old, although it is not until his Landscape with Blue Heron, dated 1871 and painted in the Everglades, that he started to exhibit a dexterity of technique and eye for composition - presumably having taken professional tuition.