{"secondaryobjectnumber":null,"periodterms":[],"creditline":"Museum purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund and the Kathleen Compton Sherrerd Fund for Acquisitions in American Art; frame gift of Eli Wilner & Company\r\n","caption":"Robert Walter Weir (1803–1889; born and died New York, NY), The Greenwich Boat Club, 1833. Oil on canvas; 54 x 77.5 cm, 77 × 100.3 × 9.8 cm (frame). Museum purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund and the Kathleen Compton Sherrerd Fund for Acquisitions in American Art; frame gift of Eli Wilner & Company\r\n (2009-1)","cultureterms":[{"id":2038492,"culture":"American"}],"type":"artobject","dimensionsproposed":"","terms":[{"id":2096381,"term":"leisure","aatid":300138173,"termtype":"Subject"},{"id":2087764,"term":"tent","aatid":300005694,"termtype":"Subject"},{"id":2056370,"term":"red","aatid":300126225,"termtype":"Subject"},{"id":2057221,"term":"brown","aatid":300127490,"termtype":"Subject"},{"id":2057929,"term":"cream","aatid":300127919,"termtype":"Subject"},{"id":2058601,"term":"green (color)","aatid":300128438,"termtype":"Subject"},{"id":2119814,"term":"ocean","aatid":300008687,"termtype":"Subject"},{"id":2059407,"term":"blue","aatid":300129361,"termtype":"Subject"},{"id":2061154,"term":"white (color)","aatid":300129784,"termtype":"Subject"},{"id":2103919,"term":"dogs","aatid":null,"termtype":"Subject"},{"id":2061162,"term":"gray (color)","aatid":300130811,"termtype":"Subject"},{"id":2089351,"term":"musicians","aatid":300025666,"termtype":"Subject"},{"id":2089463,"term":"guitarist","aatid":300235042,"termtype":"Subject"},{"id":2120273,"term":"beach","aatid":300008816,"termtype":"Subject"},{"id":2052977,"term":"paintings","aatid":300033618,"termtype":"Classification"},{"id":2088270,"term":"men","aatid":300025928,"termtype":"Subject"},{"id":2055657,"term":"figures (representations)","aatid":300189808,"termtype":"Subject"},{"id":2038492,"term":"American","aatid":300107956,"termtype":"Culture"},{"id":2053145,"term":"oil paintings","aatid":300033799,"termtype":"Classification"},{"id":2171344,"term":"canvas","aatid":null,"termtype":"Materials"},{"id":2167780,"term":"oil paint","aatid":300015050,"termtype":"Materials"}],"geography":[{"displaygeography":"Place depicted: North America, United States, New Jersey","code":"Place depicted","continent":"North America","subcontinent":null,"country":"United States","region":null,"state":"New Jersey","city":null,"county":null,"subregion":null,"locale":null,"locus":null,"river":"Hudson River","excavation":null,"geoname":"https://www.geonames.org/5121521/hudson-river.html","location":{"lat":"","lon":""}}],"dimensionelements":[{"element":"Overall","type":"Height","units":"centimeters","dimension":"54.00"},{"element":"Overall","type":"Width","units":"centimeters","dimension":"77.50"},{"element":"frame","type":"Height","units":"centimeters","dimension":"77.00"},{"element":"frame","type":"Width","units":"centimeters","dimension":"100.30"},{"element":"frame","type":"Depth","units":"centimeters","dimension":"9.80"}],"markings":null,"accessionyear":"2009-01-01","newaccession":0,"makers":[{"id":1693,"displayname":"Robert Walter Weir","displaydate":"1803–1889; born and died New York, NY","datebegin":1803,"dateend":1889,"prefix":null,"suffix":null,"role":"Artist","displaymaker":"Robert Walter Weir, 1803–1889; born and died New York, NY","displayorder":1}],"datecomputed":1833,"signed":null,"restrictions":null,"classification":"Paintings","packages":[{"packageid":208013,"name":"PUAM_Art of Comprehension"},{"packageid":194314,"name":"PUAM_States of Health"},{"packageid":193232,"name":"PUAM_Expressing Culture_American"},{"packageid":203266,"name":"web_ObjectLessons_Sections_19-26_Environment"},{"packageid":213904,"name":"Gallery_23-27(Pavilion7)-American"},{"packageid":167646,"name":"web_highlights"},{"packageid":278831,"name":"10282025-DAY1-ONVIEW"},{"packageid":197269,"name":"web_highlights -revised 2021"},{"packageid":268550,"name":"Web_CA_2025_North American"},{"packageid":190619,"name":"x-COMPLETE-Image_descriptions_HB"},{"packageid":204035,"name":"Teaching Kit Reproductions 8 1/2 x 11"},{"packageid":182974,"name":"Tour_American"},{"packageid":184819,"name":"web_SOH_1"},{"packageid":195578,"name":"PUAM_American"},{"packageid":205696,"name":"exh_tour_Object_Lessons"},{"packageid":204016,"name":"x-COMPLETE-image_descriptions_American_Art_paintings"},{"packageid":207234,"name":"SAB_Gala2021"}],"catalograisonne":null,"classifications":[{"id":2053145,"classification":"oil paintings"},{"id":2052977,"classification":"paintings"}],"exhibitions":[{"exhibitionid":2818,"citation":"Princeton University Art Museum 10/13/2018–1/6/2019 \r\nPeabody Essex Museum 02/02/2019–5/5/2019 \r\nCrystal Bridges Museum of American Art 5/25/2019–9/9/2019 \r\n \r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n \r\n","isvirtual":true,"begindate":"2018-10-13","enddate":"2019-01-06","uri":"https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/art/exhibitions/2818"},{"exhibitionid":3617,"citation":"States of Health: Visualizing Illness and Healing (November 2, 2019 –Sunday, February 2, 2020)","isvirtual":true,"begindate":"2019-11-02","enddate":"2020-02-02","uri":"https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/art/exhibitions/3617"},{"exhibitionid":3649,"citation":"Object Lessons in American Art: Selections from the Princeton University Art Museum Saturday, February 4, 2023 - Sunday, January 7, 2024","isvirtual":true,"begindate":"2023-02-04","enddate":"2024-01-07","uri":"https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/art/exhibitions/3649"}],"cultures":[],"primaryimage":["https://media.artmuseum.princeton.edu/iiif/3/collection/PUAM22_2284"],"displaytitle":"The Greenwich Boat Club","displayculture":null,"displaymaker":"Robert Walter Weir, 1803–1889; born and died New York, NY","captionhtml":"Robert Walter Weir (1803–1889; born and died New York, NY), <i>The Greenwich Boat Club</i>, 1833. Oil on canvas; 54 x 77.5 cm, 77 × 100.3 × 9.8 cm (frame). Museum purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund and the Kathleen Compton Sherrerd Fund for Acquisitions in American Art; frame gift of Eli Wilner & Company\r\n (2009-1)","displaydate":"1833","medium":"Oil on canvas","media":[{"id":237293,"uri":"https://media.artmuseum.princeton.edu/iiif/3/collection/PUAM22_2284","isprimary":1,"rank":1,"mediatypeid":1,"mediaviewtype":"(not assigned)","restrictions":null,"caption":"PUAM Photo"}],"displayperiod":null,"extended_content":true,"campuscollections":"false","bibliography":[{"boilertext":"<i>Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections </i>(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013)","citation":"<i>Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections </i>(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), p. 237","date":2013,"id":1994,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/865020505"},{"boilertext":"\"Acquisitions of the Princeton University Art Museum 2009,\"&nbsp;<em>Record of the Princeton University Art Museum</em> 69 (2010): p. 51-85.","citation":"\"Acquisitions of the Princeton University Art Museum 2009,\"&nbsp;<em>Record of the Princeton University Art Museum</em> 69 (2010): p. 51-85., p. 65 (illus.)","date":2010,"id":1248,"uri":"https://www.jstor.org/stable/41757697"}],"nowebuse":"False","periods":[],"department":"American Art","attribute_groups":[{"id":2199325,"term":"North American Art","termtype":"Collecting Area"}],"daterange":"A.D. 1800-1850","dateend":1833,"depicted":[],"titles":[{"title":"The Greenwich Boat Club","titletype":"Primary Title","displayorder":1}],"hasimage":"true","creditlinerepro":"","objectnumber":"2009-1","inscribed":null,"texts":[{"texttype":"Online","textpurpose":"Handbook Entry","textentryhtml":"\r\nA prolific artist, influential teacher, and &shy;progenitor of an important family of American painters, Robert Walter Weir was long a mainstay of the artistic community revolving around New York during the mid-nineteenth century. This masterpiece of his early career depicts a group of the artist’s friends seeking recreation and respite from a cholera outbreak in New York. Unusual among Weir’s generally more staid works for its engaging portrayal of leisure, despite the sober circumstances, the painting is a classic genre scene in its broad appeal and illustration of daily life, yet it also contains elements of the so-called conversation piece, a type of group portrait in which recognizable individuals are portrayed, full-length but small in scale, in informal surroundings. The survival of a related journal and other archival materials make it possible to reconstruct the particulars of the scene to a degree matching the picture’s unusual detail. In the summer of 1832, New York was alarmed by the arrival of a cholera epidemic from Europe and Asia, where it had claimed thousands of lives. Many New Yorkers fled to the clean, open areas just north of the crowded city. <I>The Greenwich Boat Club</I>, named after one such environ,<I> </I>recalls the time Weir spent during the epidemic sailing in the fresh air of the Hudson River in the borrowed boat of his student Walter Oddie, depicted at the painting’s far left. In the scene, the group has struck camp on the New Jersey shore, and the men are busy with the instruments that define them as artists, writers, and musicians, their particularization by profession providing a tableau of the period’s emergent bourgeois democratic culture. The painting’s appeal was noted from its appearance the year it was completed in the National Academy of Design’s annual exhibition, a review of which concludes: \"[I]t [may be] hazardous to say this is Mr. Weir’s best picture, and yet we believe we must say it.\" </P></SPAN>","remarks":null},{"texttype":"Online","textpurpose":"Gallery Label","textentryhtml":"Despite its lighthearted appearance, this painting responds to a sober event: New York City’s cholera epidemic of 1832. To avoid contagion, many middle- and upper-class inhabitants fled to the countryside. Here, the artist, standing under the flagpole, depicted himself with a group of bourgeois friends—artists, writers, and musicians. Having escaped Manhattan (more specifically the Greenwich Village neighborhood referenced in the title), they set up camp along the New Jersey shore of the Hudson River. A murky haze obscures the distant city, evoking theories about airborne miasma as the cause of cholera at the time. As if to protect the group, the boat’s sail has been transformed into a tentlike enclosure, offering a metaphorical shield against infection. Like the work by Ruth Cuthand installed nearby, Weir’s painting suggests how environmental effects are unequally experienced by those of disparate means: more than 3,500 lower-class New Yorkers—mostly African Americans and recent immigrants—were unable to escape and perished in the epidemic.\n","remarks":"AMER1_23-27_WLA   Day 1 Cataloguing"},{"texttype":"Online","textpurpose":"Provenance","textentryhtml":"Walter M. Oddie, friend of the artist, New York, by 1838; inherited by his wife, Julia Austin Meigs, New York, circa 1865; inherited by her brother, Henry Meigs, New Jersey, circa 1880; inherited by his son,\n\nHenry Meigs, Jr., New York, circa 1887; inherited by his son, Austin Graham Meigs, New York, circa 1902; inherited by an anonymous descendant [1]; [Sotheby’s, New York (NY), American Paintings, Drawings & Sculpture, December 3, 2008, lot 139]; purchased by the Princeton University Art Museum, 2009.\n\n[1] Provenance prior to 2008 is as per Sotheby’s cataloguing.","remarks":null}],"datebegin":1833,"sortnumber":"2009    1","published_date":"2026-02-11 12:12:15.603382","objectid":56238,"dimensions":"54 x 77.5 cm. (21 1/4 x 30 1/2 in.)\r\nframe: 77 × 100.3 × 9.8 cm (30 5/16 × 39 1/2 × 3 7/8 in.)","on_view":true}