Robert Walter Weir was an American artist and educator and is considered a painter of the Hudson River School. Weir was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1829 and was an instructor at the United States Military Academy. His best-known work is Embarkation of the Pilgrims in the United States Capitol rotunda in Washington, D.C. More than 450 of his works are known, and he created many unsigned paintings that may never be attributed to him.
Robert Walter Weir, circa 1864
The Entrance To A Wood (1836), watercolor and graphite on paper, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City
The Greenwich Boat Club, 1833, Princeton University Art Museum
Embarkation of the Pilgrims (commissioned 1837; placed 1844), oil on canvas, 12 x 18 feet, United States Capitol Rotunda, Washington, DC
The Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by Romanticism. Early on, the paintings typically depicted the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area, including the Catskill, Adirondack, and White Mountains.
Thomas Cole (1801–1848), The Oxbow, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (1836), Metropolitan Museum of Art
Thomas Cole, A View of the Two Lakes and Mountain House, Catskill Mountains, Morning, 1844, Brooklyn Museum of Art
Frederic Edwin Church, Niagara Falls, 1857, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Albert Bierstadt, Among the Sierra Nevada, California, 1868, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
