From childhood to the persia years

Born into a family of material privilege and progressive thinking, Weston would spend his life compelled to both make art and advocate for humanitarian causes.

Weston’s athletic body was stricken with polio at the age of 17, leaving him with an emaciated leg. Although doctors said he would never walk again, Weston threw his crutches away and learned again to climb his beloved Adirondack mountains. After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard in 1916, Weston joined the British YMCA, and as part of his relief activities formed the Baghdad Art Club. The kaleidoscopic desert colors that he sketched would reverberate in his painting fifty years later. Scenes of famine that he observed on his travels home through Persia and India would become catalysts for later humanitarian work.