I have most wanted to express through painting … what I feel in relation to what I know best …. Being alone with a woman, a mountain, a cat or a cabbage comes first. The realization of that experience in paint may come many months after.
Harold Weston, Magazine of Art, 1939
greenwich village and beyond
After four years in France, the Weston family settled for a time in Greenwich Village before returning to the isolated Adirondacks in 1930. Weston’s portrait and still-life paintings convey the values of a traditional America—hardy, independent, pioneering—and he lived up to his reputation as an artist of personal convictions. His emotional range grew larger as did the intensely focused icons from his life—snowshoes, a squash, a rhubarb in bud.
Weston was considered a major American artist during the 1930s with nearly constant exposure at galleries across the country, including the Phillips Memorial Gallery (now the Phillips Collection.) The Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), among others, included his work in group shows. And Green Hat won third prize in American painting at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco in 1939.