Martha Hale (1851-1895)

Portrait Pair of Francis and Edwin Weeks

Medium	Oil
Medium Detail	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	15 x 12 inches
Signed Location	Painted by Mrs. Weeks' sister
Date Created	circa 1885
Comments	Painted by Mrs. Weeks' sister. It is interesting to note that the frames in which these portraits hang incorporate details of Islamic script. The sitters in these companion portraits are the artist Edwin Lord Weeks and his wife, Francis Rollins Hale Weeks. Edwin Weeks was born in Newton, outside of Boston, Massachusetts in 1849, the son of affluent spice and tea merchants. Weeks became one of the most celebrated of American Orientalist painters. His subjects were derived from his frequent travels throughout the middle and far East, especially Morocco, Egypt, Israel, Syria, Turkey, Persia, and India. Edwin married his cousin, Frances Rollin Hale from New Hampshire, known as Fanny, in 1870. Weeks’ wife accompanied him on many of his journeys, during some of which they risked their lives venturing into areas in which few westerners were seen, surviving adverse conditions, and both once nearly dying from typhoid fever. The Weeks largely made their home in Paris. Edwin Weeks died at home in 1903. The backgrounds of these portraits, in color and in brushstrokes, resemble an abstraction of the kind of Islamic decoration that appears on mosques such as that depicted in Weeks’ painting of the mosque of Vazir Khan in Lahore.

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