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Although Pan and the Wolf is typical of Weir's late landscapes because of its feathery brushstrokes and rich, silvery color, it was unusual for Weir for its mythological subject. By the standards of most turn-of-the century, classically inspired art, Weir's image is quite subtle. Pan, the Greek god of the woods and fields, is represented as a statue that is barely visible in the half-light of a forest clearing. He plays his pipes to an audience of one—a wolf standing transfixed by the sound.
Pan and the Wolf dates from the last period Weir's career, by which time he had assimilated a variety of stylistic sources, including Japanese printmaking and French impressionism. Duncan Phillips also observed that despite a foray into impressionism, Weir's painting continued to be tempered by the earlier Barbizon tradition. As Phillips put it, writing in a 1922 essay, "[t]he artist seems to have said to himself, 'now, suppose I try a classic landscape as Corot would have painted had he lived a little longer'." More than just Corot, however, Pan and the Wolf recalls the larger pastoral landscape tradition dating back to Claude and the Greek poets, with the Connecticut countryside interpreted as a modern-day Arcadia.
Weir was not alone in envisioning an Arcadian American landscape. His longtime friend, Ryder, whose inspirations ranged from mythology and the Bible, to Shakespeare and Wagner, painted nature with the sensitivity of a classical poet, his scenes reverberating with the same pastoral spirit as Pan and the Wolf. Weir's colleague in The Ten, Childe Hassam, also began introducing classical imagery to his landscapes about this time, indicating a resurgence of romanticism in America that can be seen in part as a reaction to the earthshaking events of the first World War and the emergence of new, radical philosophies of art.
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