Julian Alden Weir (August 30, 1852 – December 8, 1919) was an American impressionist painter and member of the Cos Cob Art Colony near Greenwich, Connecticut.

His father was painter Robert Walter Weir, a professor of drawing at the Military Academy at West Point who taught such artists as James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

His older brother, John Ferguson Weir, also became a well-known landscape artist who painted in the styles of the Hudson River and Barbizon schools.

Julian Weir received his first art training at the National Academy of Design in the early 1870s before enrolling at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1873.

Weir also encountered impressionism for the first time, and reacted strongly: "I never in my life saw more horrible things...They do not observe drawing nor form but give you an impression of what they call nature.

He complained about the Impressionists in a letter from April 15, 1877, to his parents saying, "They do not observe drawing nor form but give you an impression of what they call nature".

Upon his return to NYC, Weir became a charter member of the Society of American Artists and continued exhibiting his work at the National Academy of Design, where he first displayed his paintings in 1875.

This was supported by the fact that Weir purchased two paintings by Manet during the summers of 1880 and 1881, Woman with a Parrot and Boy with a Sword, for the New York collector Erwin Davis.

According to art historian Hollis Clayson, "Life on the street could often frustrate and aggravate, but contemplated from far off, experienced exclusively as a visual phenomenon, it could satisfy".

[11] During the remainder of his life Weir painted impressionist landscapes and figurative works, many of which centered on his Connecticut farms at Branchville and Windham.

As a rule, his paintings done after 1900 showed a renewed interest of the academicism prevalent in the work of his younger days, with subjects treated less realistically and a greater emphasis placed on drawing and design.

It is a technical masterpiece, displaying a truss bridge that spanned the Shetucket River down the street from Weir's Windham farm.